From the course: Advanced Photography: Flash

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Calculate and use lighting ratios

Calculate and use lighting ratios

From the course: Advanced Photography: Flash

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Calculate and use lighting ratios

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- Over many movies now Andrew has been sitting here patiently being photographed while I demonstrate just lighting techniques. Now I want to do a real portrait and so I have set up a three point lighting scheme. If you've watched my original flash course you should know what's going on. I have a key light, that's going to be the main light that's hitting him. I have a fill light to fill in the shadows that are being created by the key. And I have a backlight to put some light on his head and shoulders to separate him from the background and just to generally make him look better. So for the key light and the fill light to work they need to be set to different brightnesses. The key light needs to be brighter than the fill. That should be pretty intuitive. We call that a lighting ratio, the difference between the brightness of one light and another. So I want to have a particular ratio between those two lights. I also want to have a ratio between the key light and the backlight. I'm…

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