Light is the most important part of every photo we take, it's what creates everything that we see and affects how it appears. Understanding a little bit about it can really help to improve the quality of our photos and videos.
Natural Light
Light is what allows us to see. It is what shapes and colors every object we can see with out eyes, it creates depth, mood, and color. The word photography comes from “photo” or “light” and “graphy” or “writing”, so photography essentially means “light writing” .The objective of this tutorial is to learn how to see light and use it to our advantage and create interesting and exciting photos. At the end of this tutorial you should have a basic understanding of the following fundamentals of light:
1. Exposure - how bright a scene is and how it effects our image. 2. Quality - how focused or diffuse light is. 3. Color - the color of the light in an image. 4. Direction - where is the light coming from? 5. Highlight - the brightest part of the image 6. Shadow - the darkest part of the image. 7. Contrast - The difference between the bright part of an image and the dark part of an image
How we see
When we see an object we are seeing the light reflected off of it. Sunlight contains light of every color and when it illuminates an object we are seeing certain colors of light reflected by that object that then travel into our eyes. Red objects reflect red light, and green objects reflect green light. Dark objects reflect less light than bright objects. For the purposes of this lesson the most important thing we need to know is that what we see is created by light reflecting off of everything and traveling into out eyes. A photograph is created by capturing the light that is reflecting off of our scene and traveling into our camera, where it is captured by film or a digital sensor.
There is at least one entire field of physics devoted to the study of light and how it behaves, however this type of in depth study is beyond the scope of this tutorial.
RGB- There are three primary colours in light: red, green and blue. Light in these colours can be added together to make the secondary colours magenta, cyan and yellow. All three primary colours add together make white light
Light waves- When white light shines through a prism, the white light is broken apart into the colors of the visible light spectrum.
We put a white light through a transparent prism, and this was the outcome.
These images were taken by putting different coloured gels in front of the white light we used to shine through the transparent prism. the aperture was also fairly high and the shutter speed was set at 1 second.
This photo was taken in dark room, the shutter speed was low , we also had a wider aperture. We used a torch to create something.
Using Gels on lighting can create dramatically different effects. Predicting these colour changes is something that I need to look at. Therefore I want to see how the same coloured objects will look under different gels.