From the course: Lighting for Photographers: Portraiture

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Deconstruct photos to study lighting

Deconstruct photos to study lighting

From the course: Lighting for Photographers: Portraiture

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Deconstruct photos to study lighting

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- Great photographers know how to control light, how to bend it, how to incorporate it into their photographs. One of the best ways to learn about lighting is to deconstruct or reverse engineer the photograph. There are lots of clues that can help you analyze the lighting. Let's take a look at a few of the images I took for this course and deconstruct them together. It's obvious to me that there are two lights in this photograph. You can see one in the backdrop and then one illuminating our subject, but there's more information that we can learn from examining the shadows. For example, I can tell that in the background, the light is probably pretty high and very close to the backdrop. The reason I can tell it's high is because I can see the shadows underneath the fabric folds. The reason I know that it's very close to the backdrop is because I can see that the fall off from light to dark is very fast. So that…

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