cgardner
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 p.1 #6 · Shooting Buddhist Art | |
W. Schneider wrote:
Yes, I looked around a bit today, and I could find something quite inexpensive manufactured by a company called "Britek". Does anyone has some experience with this stuff? The equipment is sold in Flash-unit packages, similar to the Alien Bees setup. However, it has been told that a Flash even used with soft-light modifiers could be quite harsh and probably hard to control, especially taken the reflecting metal or marble surface of many objects into consideration. Could it be advisable to use a pure Tungsten or some other form of continious lighting setup instead?
Thanks!
It makes little difference to the character of the light if the source of the light is a tungsten bulb, flash tube, or the sun for that matter. They all start as point light sources and all need to be modified the same ways to change the rays from parallel (relative to source and subject) to non-parallel, which is what generates the diffuse shadows.
The strategy for lighting reflective objects is to put light on the surfaces the objects reflect, rather than the objects themselves. Thus if you want a nice highlight up the side of a golden statue you'd drape a sheet of white fabric in front and to the side of it and light it, not the statue. Then to cancel unwanted reflections in the object you place black cards or drapes between the statue and the object in the reflection to kill it. Google "Photographing Jewelry" and you'll find tutorials on how to photography reflective objects.
As a general rule of thumb you use diffuse light to minimize texture and direct light to reveal it. In either case what makes the shadows harsh isn't the character of the light, but rather how much fill the shadows have. Just consider that if fill on the camera axis is slowly increased to the point where it overpowers the shadow producing key light off to the side the shadows (and texture) will appear to get lighter and lighter until they disappear entirely and the flat fill completely overpowers the directional light.
What the character (direction of light rays relative to source) controls is the rate of transition between highlight and shadow, or in other words how hard or soft the shadows are. Note its the shadow transitions, not the light itself which is hard or soft.
So the essence of controlling the rendering of texture and detail is a balance between choosing how hard or soft the shadows need to be to best represent the texture of the 3D object in the 2D reproduction by selecting the modifier and distance at which it is used, and then using the key / fill ratio to modulate the appearance with contrast; making the shadows appear dark which will created the illusion of depth and height, or well filled and light in tone which will create the illusion of smoother texture and less depth and height.
The best way to learn this is practice on different types of objects with different types of light. All you really need to grasp the principles is a 6" metal statue, 6" terra cotta statue, a basket (for texture exercises), a couple of goose neck desk lamps and a couple pieces of tissue paper or translucent fabric to diffuse the light and a variety of white and black cards to use as reflectors and flags. When you can achieve the desired lighting with that stuff on your kitchen table you will know how to tackle this project and what tools you need.
CG
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