Shadow play

In this article some information to hopefully trigger you to look at light in a different way.
We as people are always drawn towards light, and that’s not weird realizing that during the day time we function at our best. So our whole body and mind is set on function in the light. This also means that we know how everything looks during the day time, meaning we know that when someone walks in the sun there will be shadows. It’s no strange thing that we will always try to recreate this in our work as photographers. However this is also where some of the most controversial points of photography lies.

There has been countless posts, books etc. that talk about only using one light source, the explanation is simple (according to them), in nature there is one light source and that’s the sun, so using more than one light source will look unnatural and more than one catchlight…. well that’s certainly not done. Well to be honest and please forgive me for my rather “non Frank” expression but this is BS. When we look around us we can see a lot of situations were there are is than one light source “active”, think about your own house, you probably have several light sources all casting their own shadows but also placing more than one catchlights in your eyes. But also in nature there is a lot more than one light source. For example think about a person walking through the street, he/she will be lit by the sun, but what about all the reflections for cars and windows they will all show up in the eyes of a person as catchlights and will probably also interact with the shadow play, lighting up a shadow side, casting double shadows etc.

Don’t get me wrong by the way, I hate it when I see two soft boxes in a models eye, I always aim for one catchlight, but…. and I really mean this IF I use a light setup where more catchlights would show up in the models eyes, I will never clone them out, when you show this picture to someone that knows photography/light he/she will immediately see that something is wrong. However I will never use this as a close up clearly showing the two (or more) catchlights.
But let’s go one step further.

In nature the sun is above us, meaning that the light will always hit us from the top down.
So in photography we also use our light sources from the top down, and I agree I also do this in 99% of my work (with the exception of accent lights sometimes by the way), but let’s break this rule and use lights from the bottom of the floor aimed up to our model. In the following shot I used a snooted spot aimed down from the “normal” light position at our model.

As you can see this creates a rather interesting look and shadow play on the wall. Now to create some color and depth I used another snooted spot on the background with a red gel.

I also asked Susanne (our model) to pose more aimed at creating the shadow and see there we have something that looks interesting but uses light that according to some should never be used (some even call it Halloween lighting). So when working with lights creatively you can create interesting shadow play and create something that is fresh and not seen that much.