1.2 Distance - Again ...

I promised ... or at least alluded that I would redo my attempt at the second lesson concerning distance in my last post. This has been a good exercise and revealed a lot answers that have been plaguing my previous, aimless attempts at lighting.

Working with a single light is particularly eye-opening in that there is so much to realize about the possibilities. Distance, angle, intensity, texture, shape, definition ... all of which are critical to the decisions you make about your subject and photographing it or them. It points the possibilities as you add more light, reflect light, intensify light, etc.

In this, my second attempt I stuck strictly to the formula described in the assignment and worked with only two changing variables: distance and aperture. Here's the result:

So ... all I did was move the light closer to the subject and as the intensity of the light increased I stopped down the aperture to compensate for the extra light reflecting back from the subject. In that way the apparent light being reflected from the background decreased finally turning the background to a rich black.

Now I can determine how much of the background is needed for the image and know how to control that effect. That's very cool. I'm assuming that as more lights are added that making these decisions, although more complex will be easier to layer into place.

i shoot nikon