articles/Lighting/lightinglab-page1
Published 01/08/2014
By John Denton
Hiya, welcome to the first part of a new regular feature. It's my lighting lab and every edition we'll explore a different side of this fantastic raw material we all rely on, LIGHT. Call it the most frustrating phenomenon known to mankind or call it the Light Fantastic, we can't live without it if we wish to create beautiful images.
So in this first part we'll look at the most readily accessible form of lighting, the stuff that falls from the sky and is all around us for most of the day. Natural sunlight whether muted or hard and direct can be the most beautiful of all light to work with. It's also cheap. It's free and the only tools you really need to modify it are a reflector or a scrim. Reflectors come in a range of shapes,
sizes and colours. My preference is for a California Sunbounce on a frame, silver on one side, white on the other. That gives me my usual silver side to crisp up skin tone or the white side to bounce bright light back into my subject. The only time I use a gold reflector is out on a beach where the sun in bouncing off the yellow sand anyway or at the 'Golden Hour' when light temperature is warm and I want to keep it consistent.
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