Creating Good Lighting

Creating Good Lighting

by William Lulow

Good lighting looks natural. Sounds almost simplistic but it’s true. This doesn’t mean that good lighting can’t be artificial. It just means that it should not call attention to itself. When we look at a photograph, we want to see what the photographer intended. We want the subject to be apparent and shown in such a way as to capture our interest. You can tell that a photograph is really great when it brings the viewer into the scene.

Bad lighting will create its own “attention.” It will detract from the image’s message and, instead of making us look at all the details, will cause us to look at only the glaring mistakes.

The lighting, especially in a portrait, should enhance the subject – make the person look interesting, glamorous or simply nice to look at. The lighting can be purposeful. That is, it can emphasize one or more features of the person. It can be dramatic, informational, or designed to evoke a mood.

As an exercise, try lighting a person with only one light. Move the light around the person and notice what it does. Don’t make any images as yet. Just observe the effects of the light. Think about what you are feeling as your subject is lit from various angles. This will help you decide what kinds of portraits you want to make. It will almost force you to think about what the lighting does. 

Then, go back through some of these blog articles about lighting and see what some of the classical lightings are called and how to set them up. Remember, it’s not the equipment you use, but how you use it that makes the difference between an image that looks “natural” and one that doesn’t.

Each lighting setup should have a purpose. This may be to direct the viewer’s attention to a certain, physical spot in the image, or it could be to create an overall “look” to the photograph. Here are some examples of what I mean:

This lighting calls attention to the profile because it is the only thing we see in the image. Note also, the placement that is off-center. Since our eyes scan left-to-right, the placement of the highlighted portion keeps our eyes involved within the picture.

In this image, the highlights serve to give the portrait some dimensionality. The image looks totally “natural,” but since I used only one mainlight, the shadows give the face its definition.

In this scenic of New York City’s “Hudson Yards,” the interest is created by the strong, leading-in composition. Everything is well-lit.

For this shot of musician Eric Weissberg (Dueling Banjos), I used a simple side-light with a white reflector, camera right, to lighten up some of the shadows. I wanted this to be a dramatic shot, but with enough detail so that the shadows weren’t completely black. The light also throws some light on the instrument to add some context to the portrait.

So, the idea is to create some purpose to your images which takes some thought, as it should. Even dramatic images can look natural, if the reason is also a natural one and flows from the concept to the realization.