What is good flash lighting? Part 1

- In this course, we're going to spend a lot of time talking about good lighting. In teaching lighting, it's taken me a while to understand that not everyone knows what good lighting means. In this course, there are going to be many times when I talk about the lighting in one scene being better than the lighting in another, and if you can't tell the difference between good lighting and bad lighting, you're not going to learn as much from this course. The fact is lighting is an aesthetic, and aesthetics are learned. Not everyone has learned to see why some lighting is better than other lighting, so let's take a quick look at some of the things I might mean when I say good lighting. Right now, this shot of me that you're looking at is well lit. It's certainly well exposed. My forehead and nose aren't overexposed. You don't see bright highlights on them. You can see my eyes. There aren't any bad reflections off of my glasses, but this could be much better. Right now, I look flat. It's hard to tell much about the shape of my head. It's hard to see contour on my face. When considered by that standard, you could say that though this image is well exposed, it's not great lighting. What's happening right now is we've got two lights shining this direction with equal intensity. One's coming like this, the other's coming like that, and that's serving to flatten me out. Watch what happens as we dim this light. As it gets darker, this light becomes more dominant, and that creates more shadow on this side of my face. That helps you see contour. That gives you a better idea of the shape of my head. Now, of course, you know my head is head-shaped, but that's your brain interfering there. That actually has nothing to do with lighting. Now that you can see shadow, it's much easier to understand the contour of my head. We're going to make a change, though. We're going to turn on a light back there. Aha! And now I've got this nice edge detail around here, and that's helping you see depth. So the shadow is helping you understand this curve, that light back there is helping separate me from the background, helping separate the back of my head from the front of my head. This is nice lighting. So let's take a look at some examples in some actual photos. Some of these are artificially lit. Some of them are natural light. This is a nice looking photo. This is a single flash with the sun behind the subject, and again, exposure's pretty good. There's a little bit of highlight on the end of his nose, but for the most part, the highlights aren't bad, there's good shadow detail in here. There could be a little bit more light in here. It's very obvious that there's a bunch of light coming this direction. It would be nice to have a little bit of light in here to even things out a little bit, but not so much that we get a completely flat look. Also, notice the shadows in this image. It's a little hard to tell 'cause he's a little bit scruffy, but the shadows are very dark. That indicates that we need another light coming from this direction. They also have kind of a hard edge. This image is natural light. This was shot on a white amphitheater, so there's light coming from below, that's reflected light coming from below because the floor is white. There's a lot of light coming from around her because the ceiling is all white, and the light source is actually the sun, which is not hitting her directly. But I want you to notice this shadow in here. The sun is coming from this direction. The floor is bouncing a lot of light back up here, so the shadows aren't as dark in here as they were on the last example, but notice the edge. It's still a very, very hard edge. We call that the quality of this light. This is a hard, hard light that's casting these hard edge shadows. That's as in comparison to this. This is pretty similar in terms of how she's fairly evenly lit all around. She's still lighter on this side than that side, so we get a little contour, but notice the shadows in here. They're all very, very soft. They have very soft edges. Hard edge shadows, soft edge shadows, one is not inherently better than the other. They're just different looks, and those different looks create different moods. Some are more appropriate for certain types of shots than others, but something that you pay attention to when you are considering good or bad lighting.