The Art of Photography: A Practical Approach to Lighting

As a seasoned photographer, I'm often asked about my approach to lighting, and how I manage to get the best results with minimal equipment. The truth is, I'm not a "gear junkie" - I don't believe that expensive equipment is always the key to producing high-quality images. In fact, I think that's a common misconception. To me, equipment is simply a tool, and its purpose is to help us achieve our creative vision.

When it comes to lighting, this philosophy holds true. There are plenty of affordable options available for photographers, and with a little creativity and practice, you can produce stunning images without breaking the bank. One of my favorite examples of inexpensive lighting is a simple continuous light that I picked up at a hardware store. For under $10, I was able to get a reliable light source that has become an essential tool in my toolkit.

The key to using this type of lighting effectively is to understand its limitations and potential benefits. The first thing to note is that these lights are relatively inexpensive - about 10 dollars for a basic model - but they can be very versatile. By mixing and matching different wattages, you can create a range of effects that can add depth and interest to your images.

One important thing to keep in mind when using continuous lights is the importance of maintaining consistency across your lighting setup. This means using the same brand of bulb for all of your lights, as well as ensuring that they are properly synchronized with each other. When you mix different brands or types of bulbs, you can end up with uneven color casts and inconsistent shadows - a problem that can be difficult to fix in post-production.

In my experience, the most common mistake people make when working with continuous lights is to underestimate their power. These lights can produce some amazing effects, but they can also overpower your subject if not used carefully. By using them judiciously and experimenting with different techniques - such as diffusing the light with umbrellas or adjusting the wattage of individual bulbs - you can achieve a range of creative possibilities.

For beginners, I highly recommend starting with simple continuous lights like the ones I mentioned earlier. Once you have a basic understanding of how to use them effectively, you can begin exploring more advanced techniques and equipment. And don't be afraid to experiment! One of the best ways to learn about lighting is by practice - so take your camera, pick up some affordable lights, and get out there and shoot.

In fact, I'd go one step further: why not start with three continuous lights and a basic understanding of how they work? This will give you a solid foundation for exploring more advanced techniques, such as studio lighting and strobe photography. By combining these different tools and approaches, you'll be well on your way to producing high-quality images that showcase your unique vision.

Ultimately, the key to mastering lighting is not about spending thousands of dollars on expensive equipment - it's about understanding what you need to achieve your creative goals, and being willing to experiment and practice. By embracing a practical approach to lighting, you'll be able to produce stunning images with ease, even on a tight budget.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enjoin us now on flickr at flickr.com groups art of photography hey everybody welcome back to the art of photography my name is ted forbes today we're going to continue on with the long-awaited part 2 on our lighting series now as you remember last time we talked about using an on-camera flash and some of the kind of tips and tricks you can use to get the light looking a little prettier than what you get right off the flash now we'll talk about strobe lighting in the next episode but today i want to talk about continuous lighting strobe lighting is going to work a lot like your flash except it's not mounted on the camera and we'll get to that later in the next episode but today what i want to talk about is just continuous lighting and there's some pros and cons to using flash versus continuous lighting flash makes it easier to keep your shutter speeds really high because what a flash does is it emits a very bright bright light very quickly the opposite of that is to use something like i've got this lull this is actually video light but it would do the same but these are continuous lights and the biggest difference is going to be that they don't flash so they're lower wattage the downside of these is they can get hot and that can be an issue if you're shooting portraits you don't want a sweaty model for instance however uh they are really good for setting up still life's you know if you're shooting architectural interiors things like that um you know continuous lighting can be a big help and what i'm going to do is i'm going to show you uh just kind of show you around this light a little bit and i'm going to show you some really inexpensive alternatives and again some tips and tricks you can do to kind of manipulate this lighting as well like i said this is a low light and this this one in particular has this kind of cool barn door on it and so if you're shooting just in direct light you can manipulate the the doors on here to kind of direct the light and cast shadow and things like that if you're looking for a really dramatic effect other than that you can see that the bulb in here kind of has this diffusion coating on it it tones it down a little but this is still a pretty hot direct light if this was what you were going to shine on your subject again for um you know for for portraits uh depending on the wattage of your bulbs if you're using lower wattage bulbs um then you know the heat isn't as big an issue but it can be but if you're doing still life interiors things like that it's a different story um the other thing to remember too and one a big advantage to using um a continuous light over a flash is if you're looking for a really big depth of field okay and you know if you're not familiar with this go back and review the iso and the aperture and the shutter speed podcast but essentially what you want to do is if you want a real shallow depth of field it's going to be harder to do with a strobe light or a flash simply because the light is so bright it's going to be hard to match a fast enough shutter speed especially with an older camera to a wide aperture so that's another you know instance where continuous lighting is going to be your friend but this you know these work fairly well you're probably not going to get into too much expense on this but a couple things i want to show you are some manipulations you can do on here i want to show you a very inexpensive alternative to this okay so there's a couple accessories that you'll probably want to have handy if you are in fact using continuous light now remember we talked about in using on-camera flash one thing that you can do is bounce the light off of a ceiling or a white wall or something like that and you can certainly do that with continuous lighting it's a little harder though because you it's a lower powered light than your flash on your camera is and so you're not going to get as much bounce now it can be done depends on you know what the iso capabilities of your camera and things like that again depth of field what you want to do with that so some better alternatives uh rather than than using a bounce is i've got a couple umbrellas here and you can pick these up very inexpensively but what these umbrellas allow you to do is uh this one is a diffusion umbrella and so it acts uh basically if you remember that light more or less travels well more or less it does it travels in a straight line and so in order to diffuse that or break up the high contrast you need to get that to bounce and break that up and that's exactly what this this umbrella does and uh we're tight on real estate here but these these lights actually have an option to actually mount the umbrella inside the light so you can go through it uh that's just a diffusion umbrella the other um alternative that you have on here is a reflective umbrella and this umbrella is uh it's black on the outside these work really well with strobes and it has a silver lining on the inside as you can see so this kind of doubles as a reflector and so what you can actually do is i would not point the light at the subject that would put it away so the light is bouncing off of the reflective material here the other thing that's real nice if you buy a reflective umbrella it pretty much will give you a similar look to the diffusion depending on how you use it what's really nice is this one serves dual purpose and sometimes if you're outdoors and you need a second light but you got a bright enough sun sometimes you can use a reflector just to give you a little uh a little bit more light a little a little bit more of a hot spot in certain places should you need it these come in silver and gold and the biggest thing is they will affect the white balance in a way and the gold actually casts a gold light on it so that's basically what you'd want to look for in umbrellas and what we're going to do is let me switch this out i want to show you a very inexpensive alternative to all this okay and finally the last thing i want to show you today is a very inexpensive alternative i get a lot of requests in the podcast to kind of talk about things like this and it makes sense and and for those of you that are familiar with the podcast and watch this a lot i'm really not a gear junkie at all i mean i'm like everybody else equipment is fun but equipment is a tool and that tool is just supposed to get the job done and i think that really i mean there's plenty of stuff out there you just don't have to spend a lot of money to get things to do what you want it and lighting is no different than cameras and lenses and in fact i think it's much different because you can really go cheap on lighting this is simply just a real cheap work light that i picked up at a hardware store and i've got several of these and actually i bought them a long time ago you can still buy them but these are great um for a number of reasons first of all the cost on these is extremely low this one's about ten dollars you can get them in slightly different sizes which is nice i would recommend if you're going to go this route is to get a couple of them you're going to get so much bang for your buck it's ridiculous uh that's the biggest cost is the actual um you know the light itself and then the light bulbs now the only thing to be careful with is that you can mix and match your wattages to an extent just follow the the electrical instructions here but the most important thing is to make sure that you buy the same brand of bulb because when you go with the cheaper solution you do get what you pay for so for instance on the lull that i just showed you the the bulb itself is specially designed especially balanced it's more expensive and that's what you're getting out of it with these they're still going to be fine for still photography but what you want to make sure that you avoid is having different brands of bulbs and then which will cast a slightly different color white balance and that's hard to fix in post and you're going to have trouble getting that with both film and digital so it's real important to make sure that at least your lights match up these are going to be tungsten bulbs so the same bulbs that you buy to put in a lamp uh but these have these really cool you know clips on here so it's really easy to mount to the stand and uh the only thing makes it more difficult if you're gonna use the umbrellas with them you have to finagle them and probably have to use some duct tape but it can be done and you can get a a really nice lighting rig for under fifty dollars and so that's that's that's the biggest plus here uh the other thing i would recommend that even if uh this kind of spit and tape approach is not uh your style if you've never done um you know studio lighting and stuff like that before i would strongly recommend that you just go spend very little money and pick up a set of these and practice when we we've basically just barely scratched the surface here there are tons of different types of continuous lights you can buy and studio rigs and all that stuff and again like i said earlier they're just tools and the most important thing in your learning process if you're not familiar with studio lighting is to learn what you what you want what you need so what i would do is go buy three of these and practice with them when you diffuse the light out with the umbrella and we'll look at some pictures later and we'll discuss some lighting setups and i'll save that for a dedicated podcast um but one of the things you're going to realize is is that you know you do have a lot of control of things and what you want to look for is shadows and how how contrasted they are how dark they are and where they are and that's what you're going to use the lights to manipulate is is changing that um you know hot spots like is is an area of the photo too bright things like that and so if you've never done before i would go pick up a couple sets of different wattage light bulbs make sure the same brand i'd go pick up some work lights and and get out there and shoot that's the best way to learn i really can't stress that enough because i think the the downside is if you go out and spend a lot of money spend a thousand dollars on a really nice lighting rig or more and it's not exactly matching the type of photography of the style that you want to um to get across in your own work so anyway uh we'll move on next time we'll talk a little bit about strobe lights and then we'll wrap the whole series of podcasts up by looking at some images and talk about how they were lit and you know kind of get a practical approach from there so anyway once again this has been the art of photography and thanks for watchingjoin us now on flickr at flickr.com groups art of photography hey everybody welcome back to the art of photography my name is ted forbes today we're going to continue on with the long-awaited part 2 on our lighting series now as you remember last time we talked about using an on-camera flash and some of the kind of tips and tricks you can use to get the light looking a little prettier than what you get right off the flash now we'll talk about strobe lighting in the next episode but today i want to talk about continuous lighting strobe lighting is going to work a lot like your flash except it's not mounted on the camera and we'll get to that later in the next episode but today what i want to talk about is just continuous lighting and there's some pros and cons to using flash versus continuous lighting flash makes it easier to keep your shutter speeds really high because what a flash does is it emits a very bright bright light very quickly the opposite of that is to use something like i've got this lull this is actually video light but it would do the same but these are continuous lights and the biggest difference is going to be that they don't flash so they're lower wattage the downside of these is they can get hot and that can be an issue if you're shooting portraits you don't want a sweaty model for instance however uh they are really good for setting up still life's you know if you're shooting architectural interiors things like that um you know continuous lighting can be a big help and what i'm going to do is i'm going to show you uh just kind of show you around this light a little bit and i'm going to show you some really inexpensive alternatives and again some tips and tricks you can do to kind of manipulate this lighting as well like i said this is a low light and this this one in particular has this kind of cool barn door on it and so if you're shooting just in direct light you can manipulate the the doors on here to kind of direct the light and cast shadow and things like that if you're looking for a really dramatic effect other than that you can see that the bulb in here kind of has this diffusion coating on it it tones it down a little but this is still a pretty hot direct light if this was what you were going to shine on your subject again for um you know for for portraits uh depending on the wattage of your bulbs if you're using lower wattage bulbs um then you know the heat isn't as big an issue but it can be but if you're doing still life interiors things like that it's a different story um the other thing to remember too and one a big advantage to using um a continuous light over a flash is if you're looking for a really big depth of field okay and you know if you're not familiar with this go back and review the iso and the aperture and the shutter speed podcast but essentially what you want to do is if you want a real shallow depth of field it's going to be harder to do with a strobe light or a flash simply because the light is so bright it's going to be hard to match a fast enough shutter speed especially with an older camera to a wide aperture so that's another you know instance where continuous lighting is going to be your friend but this you know these work fairly well you're probably not going to get into too much expense on this but a couple things i want to show you are some manipulations you can do on here i want to show you a very inexpensive alternative to this okay so there's a couple accessories that you'll probably want to have handy if you are in fact using continuous light now remember we talked about in using on-camera flash one thing that you can do is bounce the light off of a ceiling or a white wall or something like that and you can certainly do that with continuous lighting it's a little harder though because you it's a lower powered light than your flash on your camera is and so you're not going to get as much bounce now it can be done depends on you know what the iso capabilities of your camera and things like that again depth of field what you want to do with that so some better alternatives uh rather than than using a bounce is i've got a couple umbrellas here and you can pick these up very inexpensively but what these umbrellas allow you to do is uh this one is a diffusion umbrella and so it acts uh basically if you remember that light more or less travels well more or less it does it travels in a straight line and so in order to diffuse that or break up the high contrast you need to get that to bounce and break that up and that's exactly what this this umbrella does and uh we're tight on real estate here but these these lights actually have an option to actually mount the umbrella inside the light so you can go through it uh that's just a diffusion umbrella the other um alternative that you have on here is a reflective umbrella and this umbrella is uh it's black on the outside these work really well with strobes and it has a silver lining on the inside as you can see so this kind of doubles as a reflector and so what you can actually do is i would not point the light at the subject that would put it away so the light is bouncing off of the reflective material here the other thing that's real nice if you buy a reflective umbrella it pretty much will give you a similar look to the diffusion depending on how you use it what's really nice is this one serves dual purpose and sometimes if you're outdoors and you need a second light but you got a bright enough sun sometimes you can use a reflector just to give you a little uh a little bit more light a little a little bit more of a hot spot in certain places should you need it these come in silver and gold and the biggest thing is they will affect the white balance in a way and the gold actually casts a gold light on it so that's basically what you'd want to look for in umbrellas and what we're going to do is let me switch this out i want to show you a very inexpensive alternative to all this okay and finally the last thing i want to show you today is a very inexpensive alternative i get a lot of requests in the podcast to kind of talk about things like this and it makes sense and and for those of you that are familiar with the podcast and watch this a lot i'm really not a gear junkie at all i mean i'm like everybody else equipment is fun but equipment is a tool and that tool is just supposed to get the job done and i think that really i mean there's plenty of stuff out there you just don't have to spend a lot of money to get things to do what you want it and lighting is no different than cameras and lenses and in fact i think it's much different because you can really go cheap on lighting this is simply just a real cheap work light that i picked up at a hardware store and i've got several of these and actually i bought them a long time ago you can still buy them but these are great um for a number of reasons first of all the cost on these is extremely low this one's about ten dollars you can get them in slightly different sizes which is nice i would recommend if you're going to go this route is to get a couple of them you're going to get so much bang for your buck it's ridiculous uh that's the biggest cost is the actual um you know the light itself and then the light bulbs now the only thing to be careful with is that you can mix and match your wattages to an extent just follow the the electrical instructions here but the most important thing is to make sure that you buy the same brand of bulb because when you go with the cheaper solution you do get what you pay for so for instance on the lull that i just showed you the the bulb itself is specially designed especially balanced it's more expensive and that's what you're getting out of it with these they're still going to be fine for still photography but what you want to make sure that you avoid is having different brands of bulbs and then which will cast a slightly different color white balance and that's hard to fix in post and you're going to have trouble getting that with both film and digital so it's real important to make sure that at least your lights match up these are going to be tungsten bulbs so the same bulbs that you buy to put in a lamp uh but these have these really cool you know clips on here so it's really easy to mount to the stand and uh the only thing makes it more difficult if you're gonna use the umbrellas with them you have to finagle them and probably have to use some duct tape but it can be done and you can get a a really nice lighting rig for under fifty dollars and so that's that's that's the biggest plus here uh the other thing i would recommend that even if uh this kind of spit and tape approach is not uh your style if you've never done um you know studio lighting and stuff like that before i would strongly recommend that you just go spend very little money and pick up a set of these and practice when we we've basically just barely scratched the surface here there are tons of different types of continuous lights you can buy and studio rigs and all that stuff and again like i said earlier they're just tools and the most important thing in your learning process if you're not familiar with studio lighting is to learn what you what you want what you need so what i would do is go buy three of these and practice with them when you diffuse the light out with the umbrella and we'll look at some pictures later and we'll discuss some lighting setups and i'll save that for a dedicated podcast um but one of the things you're going to realize is is that you know you do have a lot of control of things and what you want to look for is shadows and how how contrasted they are how dark they are and where they are and that's what you're going to use the lights to manipulate is is changing that um you know hot spots like is is an area of the photo too bright things like that and so if you've never done before i would go pick up a couple sets of different wattage light bulbs make sure the same brand i'd go pick up some work lights and and get out there and shoot that's the best way to learn i really can't stress that enough because i think the the downside is if you go out and spend a lot of money spend a thousand dollars on a really nice lighting rig or more and it's not exactly matching the type of photography of the style that you want to um to get across in your own work so anyway uh we'll move on next time we'll talk a little bit about strobe lights and then we'll wrap the whole series of podcasts up by looking at some images and talk about how they were lit and you know kind of get a practical approach from there so anyway once again this has been the art of photography and thanks for watchingjoin us now on flickr at flickr.com groups art of photography hey everybody welcome back to the art of photography my name is ted forbes today we're going to continue on with the long-awaited part 2 on our lighting series now as you remember last time we talked about using an on-camera flash and some of the kind of tips and tricks you can use to get the light looking a little prettier than what you get right off the flash now we'll talk about strobe lighting in the next episode but today i want to talk about continuous lighting strobe lighting is going to work a lot like your flash except it's not mounted on the camera and we'll get to that later in the next episode but today what i want to talk about is just continuous lighting and there's some pros and cons to using flash versus continuous lighting flash makes it easier to keep your shutter speeds really high because what a flash does is it emits a very bright bright light very quickly the opposite of that is to use something like i've got this lull this is actually video light but it would do the same but these are continuous lights and the biggest difference is going to be that they don't flash so they're lower wattage the downside of these is they can get hot and that can be an issue if you're shooting portraits you don't want a sweaty model for instance however uh they are really good for setting up still life's you know if you're shooting architectural interiors things like that um you know continuous lighting can be a big help and what i'm going to do is i'm going to show you uh just kind of show you around this light a little bit and i'm going to show you some really inexpensive alternatives and again some tips and tricks you can do to kind of manipulate this lighting as well like i said this is a low light and this this one in particular has this kind of cool barn door on it and so if you're shooting just in direct light you can manipulate the the doors on here to kind of direct the light and cast shadow and things like that if you're looking for a really dramatic effect other than that you can see that the bulb in here kind of has this diffusion coating on it it tones it down a little but this is still a pretty hot direct light if this was what you were going to shine on your subject again for um you know for for portraits uh depending on the wattage of your bulbs if you're using lower wattage bulbs um then you know the heat isn't as big an issue but it can be but if you're doing still life interiors things like that it's a different story um the other thing to remember too and one a big advantage to using um a continuous light over a flash is if you're looking for a really big depth of field okay and you know if you're not familiar with this go back and review the iso and the aperture and the shutter speed podcast but essentially what you want to do is if you want a real shallow depth of field it's going to be harder to do with a strobe light or a flash simply because the light is so bright it's going to be hard to match a fast enough shutter speed especially with an older camera to a wide aperture so that's another you know instance where continuous lighting is going to be your friend but this you know these work fairly well you're probably not going to get into too much expense on this but a couple things i want to show you are some manipulations you can do on here i want to show you a very inexpensive alternative to this okay so there's a couple accessories that you'll probably want to have handy if you are in fact using continuous light now remember we talked about in using on-camera flash one thing that you can do is bounce the light off of a ceiling or a white wall or something like that and you can certainly do that with continuous lighting it's a little harder though because you it's a lower powered light than your flash on your camera is and so you're not going to get as much bounce now it can be done depends on you know what the iso capabilities of your camera and things like that again depth of field what you want to do with that so some better alternatives uh rather than than using a bounce is i've got a couple umbrellas here and you can pick these up very inexpensively but what these umbrellas allow you to do is uh this one is a diffusion umbrella and so it acts uh basically if you remember that light more or less travels well more or less it does it travels in a straight line and so in order to diffuse that or break up the high contrast you need to get that to bounce and break that up and that's exactly what this this umbrella does and uh we're tight on real estate here but these these lights actually have an option to actually mount the umbrella inside the light so you can go through it uh that's just a diffusion umbrella the other um alternative that you have on here is a reflective umbrella and this umbrella is uh it's black on the outside these work really well with strobes and it has a silver lining on the inside as you can see so this kind of doubles as a reflector and so what you can actually do is i would not point the light at the subject that would put it away so the light is bouncing off of the reflective material here the other thing that's real nice if you buy a reflective umbrella it pretty much will give you a similar look to the diffusion depending on how you use it what's really nice is this one serves dual purpose and sometimes if you're outdoors and you need a second light but you got a bright enough sun sometimes you can use a reflector just to give you a little uh a little bit more light a little a little bit more of a hot spot in certain places should you need it these come in silver and gold and the biggest thing is they will affect the white balance in a way and the gold actually casts a gold light on it so that's basically what you'd want to look for in umbrellas and what we're going to do is let me switch this out i want to show you a very inexpensive alternative to all this okay and finally the last thing i want to show you today is a very inexpensive alternative i get a lot of requests in the podcast to kind of talk about things like this and it makes sense and and for those of you that are familiar with the podcast and watch this a lot i'm really not a gear junkie at all i mean i'm like everybody else equipment is fun but equipment is a tool and that tool is just supposed to get the job done and i think that really i mean there's plenty of stuff out there you just don't have to spend a lot of money to get things to do what you want it and lighting is no different than cameras and lenses and in fact i think it's much different because you can really go cheap on lighting this is simply just a real cheap work light that i picked up at a hardware store and i've got several of these and actually i bought them a long time ago you can still buy them but these are great um for a number of reasons first of all the cost on these is extremely low this one's about ten dollars you can get them in slightly different sizes which is nice i would recommend if you're going to go this route is to get a couple of them you're going to get so much bang for your buck it's ridiculous uh that's the biggest cost is the actual um you know the light itself and then the light bulbs now the only thing to be careful with is that you can mix and match your wattages to an extent just follow the the electrical instructions here but the most important thing is to make sure that you buy the same brand of bulb because when you go with the cheaper solution you do get what you pay for so for instance on the lull that i just showed you the the bulb itself is specially designed especially balanced it's more expensive and that's what you're getting out of it with these they're still going to be fine for still photography but what you want to make sure that you avoid is having different brands of bulbs and then which will cast a slightly different color white balance and that's hard to fix in post and you're going to have trouble getting that with both film and digital so it's real important to make sure that at least your lights match up these are going to be tungsten bulbs so the same bulbs that you buy to put in a lamp uh but these have these really cool you know clips on here so it's really easy to mount to the stand and uh the only thing makes it more difficult if you're gonna use the umbrellas with them you have to finagle them and probably have to use some duct tape but it can be done and you can get a a really nice lighting rig for under fifty dollars and so that's that's that's the biggest plus here uh the other thing i would recommend that even if uh this kind of spit and tape approach is not uh your style if you've never done um you know studio lighting and stuff like that before i would strongly recommend that you just go spend very little money and pick up a set of these and practice when we we've basically just barely scratched the surface here there are tons of different types of continuous lights you can buy and studio rigs and all that stuff and again like i said earlier they're just tools and the most important thing in your learning process if you're not familiar with studio lighting is to learn what you what you want what you need so what i would do is go buy three of these and practice with them when you diffuse the light out with the umbrella and we'll look at some pictures later and we'll discuss some lighting setups and i'll save that for a dedicated podcast um but one of the things you're going to realize is is that you know you do have a lot of control of things and what you want to look for is shadows and how how contrasted they are how dark they are and where they are and that's what you're going to use the lights to manipulate is is changing that um you know hot spots like is is an area of the photo too bright things like that and so if you've never done before i would go pick up a couple sets of different wattage light bulbs make sure the same brand i'd go pick up some work lights and and get out there and shoot that's the best way to learn i really can't stress that enough because i think the the downside is if you go out and spend a lot of money spend a thousand dollars on a really nice lighting rig or more and it's not exactly matching the type of photography of the style that you want to um to get across in your own work so anyway uh we'll move on next time we'll talk a little bit about strobe lights and then we'll wrap the whole series of podcasts up by looking at some images and talk about how they were lit and you know kind of get a practical approach from there so anyway once again this has been the art of photography and thanks for watching\n"