Basic Lighting

This week in my section we covered some of the basic principles of lighting, both with continuous source (hot lights), and flash (specifically dedicated flash units for digital cameras).

Lighting is a subject that is pretty near and dear to me to me so I thought I'd share a few more resources that I have found helpful to photographers new to using artificial light.

One of the best free resources is David Hobby's website, STROBIST. David was a photojournalist for the Baltimore Sun and was often confronted with situations that required sophisticated lighting, but he worked alone and couldn't carry big studio equipment. He devised a method of using small inexpensive strobes and started publishing his tutorials on his blog.  Strobist has 250,000 followers at this point.

I'm also going to upload a few chapters from my books to my website that students will be able to download (these will also be available on the blackboard site for my section).  Because my publishers will get mad if I leave them up for too long they will only be available for a week or two.  Go to the "Written Word" section of my site, the "Light is Color" and "Lighting" have useful tips for using small flash or hot light effectively

If you are shooting with a Nikon camera I'll also recommend Joe McNally's book entitled "Hot Shoe Diaries: Big Light from Small Flashes"  It's very Nikon specific and you will have to wade through Joe's deathless prose (he does tend to ramble), but there is a lot of useful information there