What Is A Ringlight And Why I Never Use Them?

Note: This is an article I published a while ago, but it bears republishing here.

What Is A Ringlight And Why I Never Use Them?

by William Lulow

It seems, of late, that with the Covid-19 pandemic and people working from home on line, they have been searching for ways to light themselves when they are seen on screen. It serves to show how important lighting is when you want to show someone off at their best. Lighting can make you or break your image, as the saying goes. So, what can the average person do, sitting in front of their computers or phones?

Some people have chosen to use what is called a RINGLIGHT. Here is what it looks like:

This model even has a built-in holder for your camera phone. Now I have to say that the best way to light the human face evenly is to surround it with light. It is why most makeup mirrors are surrounded with light. But look closely at what those lights are doing. They are lighting a REFLECTION of a person, not the person him or herself. There’s a big difference. The correct way, as I just mentioned, to photograph a human face is to surround it with light. The proper way to do this is to have a light set above the face and another one set below it, in order to fill-in any unwanted shadows. So, remember, the science of doing good portrait lighting is to surround the face with light.

Now look at what the ringlight is doing. It’s surrounding the camera with light. That’s the wrong way to go about it. It’s true that with a fluorescent bulb the light will be softer than with an incandescent bulb in a reflector, but look at the result it produces:

These “catchlights” visible in the person’s eyes look almost devilish, besides being ugly to look at. They also attract undue attention to the eyes in a bad way. So, if they are placed anywhere near the camera you are going to get these nasty reflections. If they are used as general light or off to one side of the person, they may be acceptable, but not in front of or surrounding the camera.

Ringlights were originally made for doing medical photography with a macro, or close up lens because it is often difficult to get regular studio lighting close enough so as to not cast any shadows on parts of the body that were being photographed. The Ringlight is perfect for getting in close and lighting only what the lens sees, since it is barely larger than the diameter of the lens itself. Look at the size of some of these other ringlights. They are way bigger than a normal ringlight that would fit over a camera’s lens. Here is a Canon ringlight designed for a macro lens:

First of all, this unit is designed to be attached to the lens itself. Look how small it is. This is what it was designed for, to get into small places that normal lights couldn’t be placed. They give shadowless light to parts of the human body that are being studied by providing nice, soft light so that all parts can be seen clearly.

I am reminded of a discussion I had with a forensic scientist, a doctor, who was very critical of the way the OJ Simpson murder photographs were taken by a police photographer. Apparently, he used a “flash-on-camera” set up that is typical of many “press” photographers. What happened was that much of the detail in those photos was obscured by the harsh shadows that this kind of lighting creates; a mistake from the beginning. That photographer would have been better served by using this ringlight. That’s exactly what it was designed to do.

The larger ones may look nice, as the one above, but for photographing the human face or lighting it from the camera position, they are all wrong. Never use them for this purpose.

If you use it off to one side of your computer, that may be okay as long as you don’t look at it directly with your eyes, because it can produce a soft light. But it was not designed to be used mounted on your computer or as the above examples shows, surrounding your cell phone!