Knowledge Corner

"Knowledge is the asset innovation is the process"-D. Amidon
Today Ill deal more on what I love most in photography, playing with light. Only a year had past since I became a convert on what the mainstream calls as "strobists", thanks to David Hobby for that term. I've been in photography for 3 years but never did I take it seriously, not until last year when I realized that lighting in photography brings a lot of drama to an image. Since then, everytime I have the opportunity to shoot, I play around with lights to hit my subjects. I started out with a P&S camera back then, buying it just for the sake of having one to basically using it as a tool to freeze time coupled with light (be it ambeint or artificial) to shape the image from what I see in my mind. I officially call this year as my first birthday of being a "strobist" so to speak. Last year I knew how to speak Shutter speed, Aperture, ISO, this year I learned how to speak Sync speed, light ratios, proper exposure, off-shoe lighting, butterfly lighting, Rembrandt lighting...Man! I'm now a talkative kid!


I had the chance last summer to take a photo of this gorgeous Filipina model, it was the first time for me to handle models in an actual shoot (as I was used to having just my friends to act as models for me, or just covering events with my buddies and never really getting the attention of a specific person to let him/her act something that you want in front of the lens and not to mention the first time to do a 4 lighting set-up (I would talk about it in a little while)। It wasn’t really that bad at all! Thanks to one of my mentor Ken Go, for the knowledge he imparted on me as a student It was then I knew what my late dad always told me, “Get back to the basics, dig into the basics so it won’t be that hard”. (He was my adviser in my undergraduate thesis for Plant Genetics! I always bombarded him with questions even though he was in the middle of a board meeting, as he was also the director of National Research Center dealing on Root crops, taking the advantage of being a son. Lol! I know it’s wrong!) Right there I knew that knowing the basics in lighting set-up would give you ease in handling the complicated set-ups! So here it is: It starts with you positioning the Main Light to wherever you want it, taking into consideration the “appearance” of the model to compliment the pose with how you light it, broad lighting, narrow lighting, profile pose, etc but that’s another topic to tackle on, and then setting up the fill light, as it only takes the Main in the Fill basically in lighting up the subject (usually opposite the main light as to open up shadows but not to overpower and lose shadows as shadows are allies in photography, so turn that ACTIVE D LIGHTING FUNCTION IN YOUR NIKON CAMERA!) ☺
I'll show you how I did it on my next blog.