Assignment 7 – Photography Lighting

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  • #18223
    Steven
    Participant

    [attachment=1:12iurfmh]_DSC5832.jpg[/attachment:12iurfmh]

    #19896
    Duncan Rawlinson
    Keymaster

    Thanks for submitting another assignment.

    The hard vs soft lighting is one of my favorites and I hope you enjoyed shooting it.

    The assignment reads as follows:

    Lesson 7: Assignment Assignment Title: Soft vs. Hard Lighting

    In this lesson you will take two photographs. Your first photograph must be taken in a soft lighting situation, achieved artificially or naturally and the second photograph should be a fairly exaggerated hard lighting photograph. Again, you can achieve this hard lighting situation naturally or artificially.

    You have submitted two photographs.

    Your first image is your hard lighting photograph. You can see immediately that it’s a hard lighting image because there are areas of the frame that are completely blown out white. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing but in this image it detracts from the photo a bit. The most important item in the frame is that cluster of leaves and the top of the cluster is blown out a bit. Try knocking your image down a little with an ND filter.

    Your second photograph is also nice. It’s your soft light image. You’ve accomplished the goal of the assignment but the image needs a little work.

    This image looks like it was shot using somewhat of a telephoto lens. It feels a bit flat. Telephoto or zoom lenses have a tendency to make everything appear on the same dimensional plane. In fact they use this effect in movies to make things look closer than they are. For example they often shoot someone walking in front of an oncoming train this way. It look like they’re about to be hit and then at the last second they jump out of the way… I’m sure you’ve seen it. That’s all done on a telephoto lens.

    Obviously you want to use the right lens for the right situation… In this case getting closer and using a wider angle lens would have given you some depth to the image.

    But I digress….

    The main thing is that you’ve learned about hard light and what it looks like. The next step is to use that to your advantage to achieve the look/mood/emotion/response you want. So for a fast pace sports image hard light is great. For a moody portrait soft light might be best…

    Great work and thanks for submitting another assignment.

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