Friday, August 03, 2007

Lighting distance

Lighting distance

Well the excitement just keeps on building with another series of shots of Stan. This time though the camera & subject are in a fixed position (about 3 feet apart), with a white wall about another 3 feet behind. The only thing varying here is the light position and power. What this really shows is how the light can fall off, depending on the ratio of the light to subject and light to background distance. With a high ratio the light falls off quickly (such as the first image on the left) The flash is close to Stan and turned down low. He is well illuminated but the light falls off quickly so the background is dark. Moving the light source a bit further away, so that the background is about twice as far from Stan as the light source, leads to the image in the middle. Again the flash power is adjusted so that Stan is well exposed and the background ends up more evenly exposed, showing up around mid grey. For the final shot on the left, I moved the light back another 10 feet or so. The relative distance between light to subject and light to wall become almost the same, so for a proper exposure both Stan and the background wall appear evenly lit. Next up, shots of fruit. Really. Can't you just not contain your excitment ? I'm working quite quickly through the initial Strobist Lighting102 exercises, so I'll be on to hopefully some more interesting things fairly soon. Stay tuned...

3 comments:

John Tucker said...

Gordon, it's good see you shooting and posting again. Good stuff as usual. I'll be keeping an eye on your Strobist lessons. Thanks for sharing!

-John

MW said...

I was going to say: "I'm so excited, I think i just pee'd my pants", but instead i've decided to say: "Wow, I can hardly contain my excitement."
More cowbel-- ugh, i mean, More Stan!

Amanda said...

I think I like your Amanda subject much better.

;)