We don't have a good lighting tut here at Worth, and although I'm hardly the most qualified to write one, I had a few spare hours on Wednesday. Life lesson: last minute bookings don't always work out. Anyway, this is a basic tut on what lights do to your subjects, and what you should think about.I'd like to introduce you to my 1:24 scale Porsche 959 :) It will serve as our subject for this shoot. Here it is:
Doesn't exactly seem that gorgeous, does it? At least the photo isn't blurry... but let's point out some obvious errors here.* First, I haven't bothered to clean my subject. It's not going to even be shown at its best if I don't take the time to at least wipe the grime off it.* Second, that's a hideous background.* Third, I haven't bothered to adjust the white balance. This is what is causing that awful yellow cast. Can you even tell that car is blue?* Fourth, it's a bit of a bad angle. Remember to consider your subject as a whole, a mass with angles and silhouettes. It will help you find a "pose" for the subject.Also the light is not that interesting, it's just the overhead lights in my room, casting a hard shadow straight down. Not very exciting.
Let's clean the subject a bit, get a lamp that I can move around, and adjust the white balance for the light source being used. Voil!
Well that's better.. it's a bit of side lighting, bringing out the shapes of the car. Get used to looking for shadows and reflections, because it will tell you where the light comes from. It's a great way to learn from other people's photographs. For example, the right seat here has a shadow along the side, and even more tellingly, you can see the shape of the car in the shadow going top left in the picture.If we move the piece of card the car is standing on and lift up one end of it so it curves down, we suddenly have a studio!
Okay, better. But we don't want horrible shadows like that that look like they've been cut with a cookie cutter. Diffuse your light! Diffuse! Use a bed-sheet if you have to but spread you light source over a larger area:
Now I bet you're thinking.. that's not such a huge change. Sure, the shadow is a bit softer and blurry, but so what? Well, you'll notice we're dealing with a reflective surface here, namely car lacquer. And this is an important step.Look at your subject again. Consider its properties this time. What parts do you want to emphasize, what parts do you want to hide? What are its unusual characteristics and how can you use them?
For us, reflections can be really cool, and as a sports car you've probably heard the word "lines" uttered in context. We want to emphasize the lines of the car, the way the shapes change across the body of the car. This means picking up the bubbles and contours in it, right? So we move the light, watching the shadows, and what happens with the lighting. The beauty here is that we have an area of light, and it's going to be reflected in the lacquer. So not only can you use the light for lighting, you can use it as a source of contours and shapes as reflections:
See how the light source itself is bisecting the Porsche logo at the front? How it's picking out the contours of the roof and back spoiler? Look how much shape the hood has, with huge flat surfaces of white, and jagged little supports that jet out near the windscreen. One light that picks out all that detail, the same one light we used in the last pic, but it's been moved. Don't be afraid to move your lights! Experiment!If you're using the light source as a graphic element, casting an area of light such as the windshield reflection, you might be forced to turn the diffusing sheet in weird directions to get the curve you want to the light. It might be helpful to remember that when dealing with reflective subjects, Angle In = Angle Out. This means that you may have to move your lights more off-side than you imagined.Pop quiz: Where is the light located?It's coming from top back/left, i.e above and behind the car, slightly to the left.What I miss though, is that the wheels and side of the car are dark now. Not to worry, a mirror will solve this problem. I've used a mirror to bounce back the light onto the wheels. A nifty bonus is that I can use the mirror as a square shape too, to create another patch of white. This time it's cast onto the back air intake and front wheel bubble:
That's starting to look really good isn't it? But we're not done yet!
What I like above the above shot, is that there is this great contrast between the white highlights of the light source reflections, and the dark blue of the car. Look at the front though. There isn't much here to stop the hood running into the ground shadow, they're both equally black. And that door? Can you tell it's open? It just looks like a blotch of blue on the back wheels.Lets solve that first problem, er.. first. A second light source, a fill light. I've diffused this as well, and am going to use it to pick out the front of the bumper and cut that black into some actual shapes. Here it is, just the fill light:
OOooh a bonus. We now have seat illumination! Well then, it's time to place the mirror back into the game, the one that lit up the wheels for the main light. In this position, we get the best bonus ever, namely our fill light is reflected back onto the door and picks out the curve of the metal there from the door handle:
Well in truth, I moved the fill light so that would happen :). Like I said, don't be afraid to move your lights!Here we have the key and fill light together, with and without the mirror, to show you how much one single reflector can do:
That's looking really really good in my humble opinion. I'd be happy to leave it there, only I happened to come across a piece of high-gloss photo paper when I was doing this. Remember how I said that reflections can be cool? Well, by placing this white piece of paper/card I could get it reflected in the lacquer of the car, as a milky area. I used this in the last and final shot, to fill in a little more of the back of the car and lines of the front wheel arch. I really recommend investigating where reflections come from using something stark like white card so you can eliminate them or use them to do your bidding as in this ending example:
That's it :) I hope this little intro into the joys of moving lights around will get you interested in experimenting with your light sources. I hope it also motivates you to build that diffuser or softbox you've been planning :D