3. 3 Lighting Aesthetics: Controlling Contrast through Lighting
Lighting’s Terminology:
- · Optical Medium: A medium through which light can pass is called an optical medium viz. air, water, ground glass etc.
- · Transparent Medium: A transparent medium is one through which light can pass freely, viz. air, glass, water etc.
- · Translucent Medium: A translucent medium is one through which light can pass only with an appreciable loss and so objects cannot be distinctly seen viz. ground glass, oiled or butter paper etc.
- · Opaque Medium: It is that medium through which light cannot pass viz. wood, metal etc.
- · Luminous Bodies: Luminous bodies, which are those, which emit light from themselves viz. Sun, Lamp, and Candlelight etc.
- · Non-Luminous Bodies: Those bodies which have no light of their own are called non-luminous bodies’ viz. moon, man etc.
- · Direct rays: When you look directly into the sun, or a camera's flash unit, or a flashlight ... that is direct light. The light you see is coming directly from the source.
- · Transmitted rays: When you look at a signal light the top light is red, the middle is yellow and the bottom light is green. That light is transmitted by putting a light source behind a colored filter.
- · Reflected rays: When you look at anything, you can see that object because direct light is shining on it and being reflected back into your eyes.
Visual artists of all kinds are manipulators. They deliberately arrange light and shade, line and form, texture and colour, to create carefully designed effects. They know that how the feature can be adjusted and controlled to create an illusion and influence their audience. Through persuasive arrangements, they express ideas. While using light as a persuasive tool you need to appreciate its various properties, and become adept at controlling the way in which it illuminates the scene.
Various aspects of lighting:
- · Light quality:
- · Light direction:
- · Light coverage:
- · Light intensity:
- · Colour:
Light Quality:
Hard Light is the highly directional illumination produced by any small-area light source. The light radiates from such a point source in straight lines, so casts sharp, clearly defined shadows, revealing surface contours and texture. The more concentrated a light source is, the “harder” its illumination will be; the sharper its shadows.
A hard light source does not have to be powerful. It can equally well be a single match, or a candle, or an arc. The ‘hard’ quality of light comes from its effective concentration, and not from its intensity or brightness. If a hard light source is close, or large relative to the subject, a certain amount of its light will be diffracted round the edges causing the outline of cast shadows to be softened and clear –cut.
If the lighting angle is unsuitable, hard light can produce some very
unattractive effects:
Harsh crudely defined modeling; Coarse texture; Important areas of the subject may be left unlit; Distracting shadows may form; The subject’s shape may even appear distorted.
Texture: If a surface has many extremely small irregularities, each bump or projection on it will cast its own tiny shadow, and create an overall random pattern.
Soft Light: Is the diffuse, shadow less illumination that results from scattered light. We meet soft light under natural conditions, when the sun is obscured by thick layers of cloud, by fog or mist. Lighting equipment produces soft light in various ways; by scattering through diffusion, reflection or multiple sources:
It can be used for shadow less illumination.
It will illuminate detail in shadow areas, without casting additional shadows.
It can be used to create subtly graded shading.
It can reduce or suppress unwanted texture or modeling.
Where a large area is to be illuminated, a single key light can be supplemented with soft light to produce a single –shadow effect.
It can be used to simulate natural lighting from sky light or reflected light, or
cloudy skies.
Light direction
The angle at which light strikes a subject can have a major effect on its appearance. The optimum direction will depend on the subject itself, and what you want to look like. The lighting angle you would use to emphasize the surface detail in a close shot of a coin, or the texture of cloth would produce a very unattractive portrait.
Classifying direction
Since we are lighting in a three-dimensional space, and have to make rapid off the- cuff judgments about the angle and direction of lighting; we need some kind of system for classifying lamp position, simple and unambiguous.
Light is the primary source of energy from the universe as well as the central icon of many religions and the photographer's chief resource. Photography depends on light; from single candle to powerful Sun. Therefore, an understanding of light, what it is, how it behaves and how you can learn to use it, is essential for creating outstanding photographs. Photographer uses the language of light to record and interpret the world around us. How well he understand and use light, affects the clarity and expressive power of the pictures. It is light that enables film to capture colors, details, shapes and textures. In fact, the Greek roots of the word "photographer" mean, "light writer.
*******************
No comments:
Post a Comment