​Five professional photography lighting skills

In this paper, 5 professional photographers are selected to interpret the photographic light techniques in shooting. Shooting types involve portraits, canvas prints exterior scenes, still life and advertising. The photolithography is developed in the order from shallow to deep. There are both traditional and creative lighting techniques. Rich content, and with the distribution of light schematic, very intuitive.

1. Basic lighting tool: natural light

Natural light is the most basic and commonly used light source for photographers. Now bright and strong, now dull and soft; The hues are sometimes warm, sometimes severe; Sometimes it shines straight, creating long shadows, cheap canvas prints and sometimes it diffuses over clouds, leaving no shadows at all. As the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, natural light can be the dominant light, side light, backlight and contour light. Natural light looks very natural and is always free.

Cheyenne Ellis is a professional photographer from Los Angeles who specializes in celebrity portraits and advertising. The photo above is one of a series of photographs she has taken of famous actress halle berry. For this portrait, he used only natural light and reflectors. The series has been featured in US Weekly, frames for canvas Harper's Bazaar and Shape. You'd think Ellis wouldn't be carrying a camera and a $47 reflector for such a high-profile project.

However, natural light and reflectors are Ellis' favorite combination. Her work on her website is filled with natural light. "I like the simplicity and flexibility of the reflector and the style it brings," she said. "I rarely point the reflector directly at the subject because the light is too intense. Instead, I 'feather' the light to make sure there is a beautiful reflection in the subject's eyes. The beach in this photo is like a huge light patch, which helps a lot."

2. Integration of daylight and flash

Dyad photography is a photography studio in Brooklyn, New York City, founded by photographers Justin and Colleen Picciotti to focus on business and art. The pair took a private food-themed project in surprising directions, starting with symbolic images. At first glance, these works look like "dynamic food" shot with stop-motion technology, unlike traditional display pictures. But if you watch carefully, you'll see. Some of the work you see is shocking, some is hilarious. But none of these food works emphasize the three-dimensional nature of objects, which other photographers try to highlight in their own work.

These works are real, even iconoclastic two-dimensional images. How did photographer Piciottis photograph it? Like most studio works, lighting plays a vital role. The tables, chairs, floors and cutlery beneath the elaborate spaghetti and meatballs in the above work are actually printouts, not objects. To trick the eye and make the scene look like a shot taken at once, the color and density of the "room fixtures" and the pasta light have to be consistent. This isn't easy, as the desktop gets its light from Windows and the pasta from the flash.

But the lighting also makes the viewer notice that these are not ordinary commercial images. For example, photographer Picciottis deliberately lit the noodles from the opposite side of the light falling on the table. "We chose to combine light sources in different directions to highlight the control of perspective," he explained.

To highlight the pasta against a cooler background, photographers chose lighting that was slightly warmer than the background light. The photographers spent hours taking and printing photos of the desktop, using white/silver reflectors and black cloth to align the levels of light on the desktop, chairs and floor. For the shoot, they hung a hasu 501 with an Aptus75 digital back over the table, using a 50mm f/4 Carl Zeiss lens.

Desktop picture

After laying out the pasta, the photographer used a radar-radar-mounted flash to illuminate the whole scene, which is wide and soft enough to simulate the light coming in from a window. "One of the tricks of lighting when photographing food is to use a more directional light source that can capture different textures of each element," says Picot’s. "The radomes allow us to soften the light without weakening the shadows, and we also placed white and grey patches around the pasta to further strengthen the shadows and highlight the direction of the light."

The radome is also used to enhance the spatial feel of the mozzarella in the image, which is the most dramatic sign of the difference between this work and traditional food photography. Another benefit of using a radome is that lowering the Angle of the radome prevents the paper from reflecting light.

The lighting for this simulated stop-shot was arranged by Picciottis using natural light from Windows to light the table top, and by pofuto Acute2 2400WS studio lamp ($3,245) and pofuto white radome ($352) to light the pasta. The studio lights use Pocket Wizard wireless trigger ($351) to flash synchronously. The white and gray patches help increase the density of the shadows, accentuate the shadows and highlight the direction of the light.

3. Professional location photographers move their studio outdoors

Lighting on location can be one of the toughest challenges for photographers. Photographers must carry light fixtures, bring or find power, and seamlessly combine ambient and artificial light.

For that reason, New York photographer Laura Barisonzi began her portrait of a bodybuilder using only natural light and reflectors.

But the sky is full of clouds, and ambient light alternates between direct and scattered sunlight. The lighting strategy used by the photographer was to use two studio lights to block out the sunlight so she didn't have to worry about whether it was hitting the model directly.

"For me, the trick to using light on location is to make sure there's plenty of power," she said. She doesn't like batteries because the time between flashes is too long. "If it was battery-powered, I would rush to finish the shoot because I was always worried about running out of batteries, so I usually used a generator to power the flash."

She also likes to use Pocket Wizard wireless triggers to keep her space tidy. The lamp holder is too high for the wind to blow over, so when the wind blows, Barisonzi USES sandbags to increase the weight of the lamp holder and has an assistant hold the higher lamp holder to the left.

Laura Barisonzi shot this piece using two AlienBees B1600 studio lights ($360 each), a GS1 honeycomb, and a Honda EU3200i generator to provide electricity. The photographer used a Nikon D3 with a 24-70mm f/2.8 lens.

4. When it comes to jewelry, glamour is everything

Reflective objects are the hardest to light, and jewelry is the most time-consuming. The greatest challenge is to make inanimate objects glow and glow. "We look at every aspect of jewelry, especially diamonds, because they are expensive," Mr. Barowsky said. Faraone Mennella's 18-karat gold bracelet is studded with fine white, brown and champagne diamonds.

"For this photo, the effect was entirely lighting, with little post-editing. Of course, we also needed a sharp macro lens to capture the subtle changes in the cut surface and color of the diamond. Lighting must be done one light at a time, as well as one light at a time on the cut and surface of the jewelry. Some jewelry takes more than 10 lights and reflectors at once. "You have to keep adjusting the light on a surface until it's done," Barowsky explains. "Keep the lighting tight and don't let ambient light leak in and affect the color temperature." Light reflected from the background can cause dead black areas in the picture. To avoid this, surround the subject with lights, shades, and reflectors.

The photo was taken using two 3200WS brown-unilite type studio headlights. The left and right sides of the bracelet are placed one at a time. The Plexiglas panel is placed in front of the lamp with soft light. The bracelet is placed on a reflective piece of 925 silver paint. Since the lamp holder is latticed, the light passes through the plexiglass and then decays again, thus creating subtle tonal gradations on the gold.

The brown Picolite near the camera position creates a concentrated light that adds luster and sparkle to the diamond, while the light box behind the bracelet keeps the background clean and reflects light on the silver reflector.

Accurate exposure control is also important, and photographers rely on exposure histograms to do this. While many photographers use histograms to preserve details of highlights or shadows in their photos, jewelry photographers use them to monitor the glare of jewelry and ensure that the glitters are not overexposed. "Controlling glare is one of the main challenges when shooting bright, dazzling jewellery," says Barowsky.

"One trick to reduce glare is to gradually increase the histogram reading of the background light to 255. Any more than 255 and you'll get unnecessary glare."

The Antfarm photo studio team used a brown Picolite shadow room lamp ($720) with a spotlight hood and grid, and two brown Unilite 3200WS lamps ($1,510 each), powered by the brown grafit power supply, to capture the two diamond-studded gold bracelets. The photographer used a senna P2 4 x 5 camera with a senna 54h digital back and schneider 120mm f/5.6 macro lens with an f/32 aperture.

5. Keep it dark in the light

Effective use of lighting is an important part of advertising photography. The photo above was taken for a 2010 brochure for Honda's CRV minivan and hybrid SUV. Los angeles-based car photographer Jeff Ludes and three assistants spent four hours on the photo.

The main light was the Arri tungsten lamp, and the photographer did not use the Fresnel lens often used in cinematography. "The reason we didn't use the Fresnel lens was because we wanted the light to flow through the image, like a street lamp," Ludes said.

In fact, the existing lighting in the field is also an important part of the whole lighting arrangement. All the added background lights are equipped with acetate filter for color correction, which is used to ensure that the color temperature of the output light is consistent with the street light.

The ultimate goal of the photographer is to add color and ambience, giving the car an emotional hue -- optimism, youth and urbanity. But it's also important to use lighting to outline the shape of the car, to show the shape, lines, colors and size of the car. To highlight the main body, the photographer chose a brighter light than the warm background to highlight the blue body.

Considering the blue sky and the reflection of the Windows, the photographer chose to take this photo at dusk. "The difficulty with lighting at dusk is that the lights are ready at dawn, when it's impossible to determine the placement and brightness level of the lights," Ludes said. "As the sun goes down, you have to quickly and accurately adjust the final position of the light and shoot in a small window of time with the perfect balance of daylight and light."

If Ludes had used 2,000-watt lights throughout the scene, it would have ended up with deep dark shadows in areas not illuminated, which would have undermined the photographer's vision of a vibrant, light-filled street scene. "We often use 150-watt light with little power," Ludes said. "It is generally not noticed that when light is used in a dim scene, a small, dark light is usually more appropriate than a large, bright light, and too bright light will only create dark shadows," he explained.

A waterwheel doused the street, giving life and luster to the otherwise dark and featureless black surfaces. The photographer's team even "built" the sidewalk in the foreground to hide the fact that the vehicle was actually parked in the middle of the road (the vehicle was actually parked in front of a driveway).

The final image is composed of eight different photographs, each composed, illuminated and selected for a specific element. For example, the side, back and tires of a car are exposed separately. "If the lights hit the fenders properly, there would be deep shadows in the hub slots, huge canvas prints making it necessary to expose the tires separately," Ludes said.