Photography Class Assignment 4: Lighting

This assignment was about different kinds of lighting: back lighting, side lighting, 45 degree lighting, diffused lighting, front lighting etc. Click on image to enlarge. This is the artist statement.

For both of the photos, I turned off all the lights in the house to obtain total darkness. The light source I used was an LED flashlight while the subject was placed in my laundry room. The main subject that I used was a basketball because it exhibits many details that can be greatly altered depending on the lighting situation—similar to a human face.

The first photo I used backlighting by placing the flashlight behind the ball. This created a very strong silhouette of the ball giving it an almost mystical and mysterious feel similarly to a solar eclipse. Almost no detail about the ball can be seen besides the outline of the shape from that angle. Furthermore, the backlighting makes the photo very flat and two dimensional. I set the exposure for 10 seconds with an aperture of f/4.5 at ISO400.

For the second photo, I kept everything in the same position except moved the flashlight off to the side about a 45 degree angle both laterally and vertically. Since the ball was static on the washing machine, the reflection from the washing machine along with the white walls in the room created a reflection that was almost opposite to the flashlight—creating the illusion that two lights were being used perpendicular of each other at a 45 degree angle from the subject. With this lighting, the intricate details of the basketball can be seen. The mysteriousness of the silhouette is gone and the subject is identifiable. Many of the intricate details of the basketball emerge. Also, the eye can then easily perceive the three dimensional aspect of the photo. I set the exposure for 1 second with an aperture of f/4.5 at ISO400.

Grade: 4.0