Review: Focus on Lighting Photos

I have blogged about the awesome Mr. Fil Hunter before. His much-acclaimed book, Light: Science and Magic, is probably the first to be picked by every amateur who’s trying to get a little more serious about photography. But as with most scholarly work, this book too is not without a flaw. In fact, it was such a glaring omission, that I occasionally found it embarrassing to recommend this book to others. What is it, you ask? This book, and I am not making this up, didn’t have a single contribution from yours truly! Fallen of your chair yet? No? Damn you.

But the good Mr. Fil Hunter is a decent chap, and he has the humility to own up to his errors in judgment. And he did just that with his new book, Lighting Photos. It involved a lot of convincing, whining and groveling of course, but I don’t want to get into all that. Suffice to say that the matter has now been resolved and everything is finally alright with the world.

Lighting Photos is the new title by Fil Hunter and Robin Reid. As with the rest of the Focus On series, this book picks up a specific area of photography (in this case, Lighting) and aims to equip the reader with a working knowledge of the craft to enable her to start taking photographs instantly. Lighting Photos breaks down the intimidating subject of lighting setups into bite sized doses, and illustrates, through detailed examples, on how to get specific results. It’s ideal for people starting off in photography as the recommended equipment is fairly basic, and doesn’t require you to sell your kidneys for that fancy stadium-sized soft-box or over-engineered beauty dish. It is full of tips from Pros and inspiring photographs from contributors across the world. And once you’ve mastered these, you graduate to L:S&M

Amazon UK is still running a Free Shipping Scheme for India, methinks. So, you might want to hurry up. Go and click this link already!

I spent a lot of time mulling over what excerpts of the book I would like to include in this blog. And going by pure merit, here are the 2 pages that I think clearly stand out. And oh, the fact that both the pages have contributions from yours truly is entirely coincidental. I am very fair that way. Ahem. Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.

Applause. Bow. Thanks!

©2012 rollon. All Rights Reserved.

It seriously doesn’t.

©2012 rollon. All Rights Reserved.

There comes a time in every amateur photographer’s learning curve when they come across an image that requires them to pause and ask, ‘am I ever going to be that good?’ All the nice little macro images of blossoming sunflowers and the ever-active cockroaches under the bed that they just uploaded on Flickr somehow seem a little off-target compared to the image in question. As they twiddle their thumbs, alternately glancing at their new 55 – 2000mm AF YU FG KK BC !! lens crafted from ores harvested from Proxima Centauri and the stack of unpaid bills that were themselves beginning to look threateningly like a meteor shower, the sense of urgency seems to heighten. At this juncture, the usually reassuring comments like ‘You’re a Photographic Genius, Comment 5, Post 1′ somehow seem unable to overshadow the burgeoning question, ‘Am I talented?’

Err…no. The plain and simple truth is that everyone cannot be as gifted as I am. But let’s just put that handicap aside for the time-being (since there’s very little you can do about the fact that you’re not me). How can you make progress? How can you get *almost* as good as I am? Huh? Heh? Hmm? Quite frankly, the easy way is to kill yourself instantly and pray that you are reborn with a little more talent (on second thought, you might want to do it the other way round). A roundabout way of achieving the same thing is to use the following resources:

Light, Science and Magic: If Photography were to turn into a religion in the future, there’s a very distinct possibility that this book would go on to become the Bhagavad Gita/ Bible/ Quran/ Zend Avesta/ <fill here>. First published in 1997 (I don’t really know that, and I don’t care – just needed something to start the sentence with…), this book takes you through the basics of lighting in the context of still photography. That, it does through some easily replicable photographic exercises, illustrated through very detailed lighting diagrams. In fact, what you read in my previous post was a rather shameless reconstruction of one of the exercises from this book. The text is lucid, and instead of just ordering you around to ‘place gelled light at 45 degrees to left of camera’, it in fact explains why you should place gelled light at 45 degrees to left of camera’ and how it would impact the final photograph. What this does is give you the necessary dope and the confidence (funny how both of these always seem to come together) to think through your own shots and try variations. And in fact it is these variations that contribute the most to your learning. Get it here! You will not regret it. If you do, I promise to get rid of your copy for free.

Strobist.com: Mercilessly stretching the religious motif further, David Hobby is perhaps the Johannes Gutenberg of Photography. Prior to the craze that is Strobist.com, photography was an elitist pursuit, reserved for a very niche kind of people who were either already well known professionals or were not bogged down by the mundane details of life like responsibility and having to earn a living. Credit goes to David Hobby for peeling off, layer by layer, the mystique that surrounded photography and make it more accessible. Through his blog, he suddenly made people realize that one need not necessarily have lights the size of airplanes and equipment that merited visits from UN inspectors every other week, to take decent photography – just a tiny little strobe is enough. In fact, the Strobist website attacks this idea with a vengeance – an often reinforced theme here is to make-do with whatever is around, rather than investing in expensive equipment and writhing in guilt every time the folks at home made a fuss about the disconnected phone line, the erratic electricity supply or the irregular milk supply.(Alternately, he could also be blamed for the deluge of blogs on photography by talentless idiots, who insist on dishing out crap in the name of photographic knowledge – a specimen here). Through a series of articles imaginatively called Lighting 101 and 102, the Strobist website takes one through the basics of off-camera flash, and how it can be used effectively to create professional looking photographs without having to file for bankruptcy. There is an ‘On Assignment‘ section that’s dedicated to the dissection of photo shoots that helps one recreate the same. Also, there are Boot Camps (currently, Boot Camp 2 is on) that offer assignments that the readers can participate in. (I rocked assignment One of Boot Camp 2 – see here!). And in case one is at a loss as to where to start, there are the Strobist DVDs that pretty much encapsulate everything one needs to know to catch up – find them here. Lastly, there is a very large following of the website present on the dedicated Flickr group – this is a very active and helpful community that one can learn a lot from (barring the occasional Off-topic post on burning issues like ‘A Bride threatened me with a shotgun…‘).

To be continued…

©2012 rollon. All Rights Reserved.