sources of light
Four kinds of artificial light sources for photography
Light, is the main ingredient in a photograph. There are of course other ingredients: time, composition, subject matter, emotion and your unique style, but light is the thing that makes photography work.
Light is the thing that early inventors had to hold or fix, in order to make a photograph stick around.
We call nature’s light, natural or available. Think of sunlight or moonlight.
There are four common types of artificial light sources used in photography today incandescent fluorescent
LED
studio strobe
Incandescent
This lighting ranges from the common light bulb to large tungsten “hot lights” used in the studio and on movie sets. They are warm in colour temperature compared with natural daylight.
The light from a bare bulb is pretty harsh. That’s why we use lampshades on lights in our homes. The quality of incandescent lighting can be modified using flags, reflectors and diffusion material. They get hot to touch, so you need to be very careful around children and when photographing things that melt – like plastic or ice cream.
Fluorescent
Most public buildings and offices are lit with fluorescent lighting tubes. They’ve been around for decades. They aren’t common in photography, but we sometimes get stuck with them if we’re shooting in corporate offices. One problem is that the tubes come in different colour temperatures. Traditionally they were greenish, and you had to have a magenta filter on your lens to correct for it.
Now they come in many different flavours: cool white, warm white, daylight balanced, traditional green. As a result, it’s hard to white balance for fluorescent lighting, as you never know which type of bulbs are in the ballasts, or even if the bulbs match the ones next to them. You could have a room that has 2 or 3 different coloured tubes. In this case I’d definitely recommend doing a custom white balance using a grey card.
New CFL curly bulbs
Now there’s a new
Light, is the main ingredient in a photograph. There are of course other ingredients: time, composition, subject matter, emotion and your unique style, but light is the thing that makes photography work.
Light is the thing that early inventors had to hold or fix, in order to make a photograph stick around.
We call nature’s light, natural or available. Think of sunlight or moonlight.
There are four common types of artificial light sources used in photography today incandescent fluorescent
LED
studio strobe
Incandescent
This lighting ranges from the common light bulb to large tungsten “hot lights” used in the studio and on movie sets. They are warm in colour temperature compared with natural daylight.
The light from a bare bulb is pretty harsh. That’s why we use lampshades on lights in our homes. The quality of incandescent lighting can be modified using flags, reflectors and diffusion material. They get hot to touch, so you need to be very careful around children and when photographing things that melt – like plastic or ice cream.
Fluorescent
Most public buildings and offices are lit with fluorescent lighting tubes. They’ve been around for decades. They aren’t common in photography, but we sometimes get stuck with them if we’re shooting in corporate offices. One problem is that the tubes come in different colour temperatures. Traditionally they were greenish, and you had to have a magenta filter on your lens to correct for it.
Now they come in many different flavours: cool white, warm white, daylight balanced, traditional green. As a result, it’s hard to white balance for fluorescent lighting, as you never know which type of bulbs are in the ballasts, or even if the bulbs match the ones next to them. You could have a room that has 2 or 3 different coloured tubes. In this case I’d definitely recommend doing a custom white balance using a grey card.
New CFL curly bulbs
Now there’s a new