Comparing Readings On Lighting to Guest Speaker

Within this journal post, I will be looking at the two assigned readings on lighting: The First Aesthetic Field: Light, and Structuring the First Aesthetic Field: Lighting and comparing and contrasting to the guest speaker’s workshop on light. First off I found the workshop more valuable than the assigned readings. I am a visual and hands on learner, so this exercise was a lot more valuable because I was allowed to actually use the equipment and try and reproduce the lighting in the books. It made me realize how much I would hate for my job to purely be working with lights on different sets, it is such a time consuming job in order to get it to look perfect.

Lighting is defined as “the deliberate manipulation of light and shadows for a specific communication purpose” (19). I found this sentence to be particularly interesting because it’s true that lighting can communicate a lot of information just as much as say mise-en scène of a film can. If the lighting is bright, then the viewer automatically perceived the scene as happy and nothing bad is about to happen, where was if the scene is darkly light then the viewer thinks it’s very dark and sinister and something bad might happen. Lighting can make a viewer perceive the scene differently just by how the lighting is. The way a certain character is lit can also help to typecast a character as evil or as a brooding. “Lighting helps us, or makes us, see and feel in a specific way” (20). Lighting can be used for multiple functions, where as when you sit and watch the video you do not understand the amount of work put in, to light these different scenes to create these different feelings and shape the way we see things.

When we finally had the opportunity to reproduce the image we picked in the art books provided to us, I thought it would be fairly easy to reproduce the lighting. I did not know that there are so many different light sources that can be used to mimic the effect in image. The guest speaker provided us with a Chinese lantern that I would have never guest would have produced such style of light, we were also provided with sheets to cover the light reflecting off the walls creating to much light. And lastly we also learnt that you can bounce light off form core to help produce the different effects you want.

The certain picture we were trying to recreate had “fast falloff” which the reading defines as “the brightness contrast between the light and shadow sides of an object” (25). Our subject that was being lit had shadow on only one side of their face while the other side was still light enough to reveal a certain contrast between the two and the subject looked “ominous” while sitting in darkness. We had to diffuse the light by using a black cloth to stop the reflection that hit the ceiling from affecting the overall shot. We also had another light that was directional to help give the subject the shadow on one side of the face while having the other side dimly still lit. Below is an example of how the fast falloff can be created and an example of what fast falloff looks like.

Example:

Overall, I found this exercise very valuable because it allowed me to actually try and recreate the lighting as a group. I found this was very helpful, since I learn better when I do something rather than having it lectured on.