Lighting Laws -  1209 days ago

 

When trying to achieve control over the illumination on a subject or throughout a location, the placement of your light can have great implications, thanks to the Inverse Square Law. This law states simply that for open bulbs, the intensity of the light is inversely proportional to the square of the distance. Got that?

More practically stated, moving an object twice as far from the light results in it receiving one quarter the illumination. If you’re trying to light two people using close range lighting, and one of the subjects is farther away from the light source, that person will be quite a bit less illuminated than the person closer to the lamp. The result will be somewhat dramatic with the variance between the lit and the unlit subjects. The solution (besides buying more lights) is to move the light source farther away from both of them so that the difference in distance between each subject & the light won’t cause dramatic differences in illumination.

“Take the case of two interview subjects-one with light skin and one with dark skin. With even lighting, you may find it’s hard to get detail in the dark-skinned subject without blowing out the highlights on the light-skinned forehead. Conversely, exposing for the lighter subject might leave the darker one cloaked in shadow.”

That above quote comes from someone who explains this much, much better than I. If you can’t understand what I’m trying to say, but believe it might be worth knowing, than read this article by Adam Wilt.

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