FigandLight – Lighting Foundations Photography Course

How We See Light

• Understanding how our brains are wired to pick up certain elements around us is crucial to understanding what makes great light and therefore, a great image. We cover some of the major elements in this video.

What Light Does

• After getting a sense of how we see photographs, now it’s time to look at what light actually does. What does it do? How does it shape the way we see objects in everyday life? How can we use it in our photographic lighting?

The “Emotional” Side of Light

• In the last lesson, I talked about what light does, including evoke emotion. But what exactly does that mean? We know that light CAN provoke emotion in the viewer. But have you ever wondered….why?

Understanding the “Zone System”

• There’s a good chance you’ve already heard or learned about the “Zone System”. But how can we apply it to our work? How can it improve our work?

Light Fall Off

• Probably the most widely covered topic in photography lighting, but perhaps the most misunderstood concept in lighting as well. In this video, you’ll learn everything you need to know about the inverse square law without needing to learn the math!

Light Qualities

• What “soft” light means to one person, might mean “diffused” light to another. This has the potential to cause frustrations and even unpleasant debates, so in this video I discuss the differences between two categories of light and how each quality of light is achieved.

Transmission, Reflection, SSS

• Probably the toughest thing to deal with when setting up your light are reflections. In this lesson, we’ll look at the nature of reflections along with concepts like transmission, absorption, and scattering. And we’ll talk about how knowing these can help us in our lighting.

The Color of Light

• In this lesson, we discuss color temperature and white balance and the differences between the two, what they describe, and how to work with each.