Blog - Lighting, camera, action!

Lighting is a subject close to my heart.

Even most amateurs realise that lighting is essential to taking a decent photograph. Basically, as long as you can see the object then, from a lighting perspective, you’ll take a fairly good shot. However it is when inexperienced photographers try to turn their hand to something more detailed to add depth, feel and mood to an image that it tends to go Pete Tong.

That’s why you need an experienced professional photographer with a creative eye and their own well-equipped studio to achieve stunning photography that works.Don’t get me wrong, sometimes setting the lighting for a photo-shoot is quite straightforward. If you are looking for a happy, smiling family portrait, then you’ll look to set even lighting to show both sides of the face(s) and to bring out plenty of detail. But let’s say you’re after a more dramatic effect. That’s when you’ll need something a bit more skilled and subtle.As a multi faceted photographer, I get to shoot a wider variety of subjects in my studio. A client will often list a number of aims they want the photography to achieve – usually these are crucial messages to promote the subject in question. Highlights may be allowed to be too bright and you may even need to add some colour to the lighting.Here are a few examples of the same subject with different lighting:

Image 1: The lighting is very flat, has no mood and all of the detail is visible.

Image 2: The lighting is added from the top only so some mood is created and it is more like a bright overcast day, still holding most of the detail.

Image 3: This shot is lit from the side only giving a little more mood but still holding the detail.

Image 4: This is by far the most dramatic option - strongly lit from the back, like a setting sun, the shadow is thrown forward and there is not too much detail on the front left.

Image 5: This has the same lighting as Image 4, but I have used a mirror to throw some extra detail back into the front left.

Now imagine applying some of these techniques to photography for a book cover. Here are some possible examples where lighting could relate to the subject.

1.     Straightforward picture of the author – possibly something quite generic.

2.     We are starting to engage the viewer so the subject could be a little more thought provoking. If it was a book about finance the subject could be a piggy bank, for instance.

3.     This could be a portrait as the detail is quite good. For example, it could convey trust with the viewer if the book is about giving advice.

4.     This is the most dramatic of these images. The subject could be quite sinister, a factual crime book or fictional thriller, maybe about murder or espionage.

5.     As with No. 4 this image suggests intrigue. However as some of the detail is thrown back in via the mirror, it has a slightly softer edge, so it could be a fictional crime novel, although possibly a detective mystery as it suggests the content might be more about the solution than the cause and the person solving it.

These are all merely “serving suggestions” of course. A bit like cookery where the taste is a result of the recipe rather than a list of ingredients, with lighting the ultimate barometer is the quality of photography produced rather than established theory.

I have shown here are some some stereotypical ways of doing things. Rules, of course, are meant to be broken. The aim is to create great lighting that works - good photography is about results not principles!

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Darren Shipman