Part 4 - Exercise 11

The lighting angle

For this exercise I cajoled a relative to act as my model as I took a series of shots as I moved the light into various positions around her. The camera was on a tripod. The background was a set of curtains which cover a large window - it was daylight outside so the background itself has produced a very small amount of light.

Overall, this was an enjoyable and interesting and somewhat surprising exercise. It was curious to see how much even slight changes in the position of the light could change the characteristic of the lighting, equally how small movements in the subject could change the impact of the light upon it. I was also surprised at how strong the light looked as I pointed it, but how long the required exposures were. 

I was immensely aware that I was only scratching the surface in this exercise in terms of what is possible. I'm not really very happy with my results and fell that considerably more time and patience would be needed in order to get something passable - both in terms of controlling the light position, strength and also the position of the subject - never mind the expression of the subject. I think I'd also need to spend more time getting the exposure right. 2 initial things to change would be the background (plain black or white would be better), and I'd also prefer to have the subject in some plainer clothing.

One final thing - I'm not sure what the colour cast from this light might be. I had the camera set to AWB, but I think I'd need to experiment to find out what the colour temperature might be.

I've not really processed these shots, clearly if I was after a specific effect there would be a good opportunity to do specific type of processing.

The first shot is without the light on and just the residual light of the room.

 I started on the right. The effect looks quite typical, standard fare, but is neither flattering (the shadows are too intense don't aren't complimentary to the shape of the face), nor particularly dramatic.

By moving the light up and over slightly the light feels more purposeful. The shadows are still too stark to be flattering, but at least they don't cut across the shape of the face as they do in the shot above - instead they emphasise the shape of the face.

Here the light is starting to move over to the right. Again, this feels a bit pointless in terms of its effect.

I then started to move the light more extremely to the left - here it's at close to 90 degrees to the subject. This could be quite dramatic, but I think the shoulder would need to be placed more purposefully.

The light is now slightly from the below. The dynamism of the above shot is now lost.

Here the light is from above and slightly behind. The feel is definitely dramatic. But somewhat out of keeping with subject.

The light here is slightly higher. Another angle which emphasises form.

The light here is very much from behind (this is the sidelight effect which I tried to achieve in exercise 6). Another dramatic look which emphasises form.

The final backlit shot actually has the light pointing slightly toward the background. 

I then moved to positioning the light more head-on. I was surprised how difficult it was to get this to look flattering and natural. I completely failed to get the kind of look I found easy to achieve in exercise 6 when the light was straight on.

The light in the above 3 shots is really quite unflattering.

This is less straight-on, but is one of the most flattering shots. The shadows are complimentary to the shape of the face and aren't too deep.

The final shot is also fairly flattering - it's slightly more head-on than the above shot.