Monday 8 March 2010

Why I need to learn to light (via Ask MetaFilter)

However, you will learn how to light in a dark room, which will be the single most important skill in your repertoire. If you can make it look like natural light, you will be extremely successful. Nothing personal to all the natural lighters out there, but when a big project is on the line, one rainy day and you're fu*****. Who cares if you're good with your DSLR.

Wow, that says it pretty succinctly. This is part of a larger piece from AskMeFi on how to become a magazine photographer, which is chock-full of useful information and tips (most of which are those sort of tips that are "obvious if you think about it, but you probably won't think about them because they're pretty scary and involve a lot of work")

I definitely need to learn to light my food work more effectively. At the moment I'm very reliant on decent daylight, as this post points out, and tend to shut up shop as soon as the light fades – but this suits the style of imagery that I'm making at the moment. I don't have deadlines or scary photo editors breathing down my neck. However, in the dark British winter this does mean that the hours where I can take pictures are severely reduced in number. And I don't ever want to find myself in the position where I have to turn down a job because I don't have enough daylight to supply the images that the client's after!

Something to think about.

Posted via web from Charlotte's posterous

No comments:

Post a Comment