From the course: Advanced Photography: Flash
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Decode lighting
- Earlier I asked you to start the practice of looking at images and paying close attention to the lighting. At that time we were talking about looking at shadows and thinking some about the feel of an image. Now I wanted to show you a trick you can use to really try to figure out where lights were placed. You may know this trick already, it's very simple. I have this image here, and you can tell right away that there's some strong light in the front of the face, soft shadows on either side. We know that they're using soft lighting. But the key to decoding what they've done with their lights is to look in the eyes because the catch lights in the eyes the reflections of the lights are clearly visible here. I can not only see where the lights were positioned. I can see in this upper light exactly what the light was. It was a giant octobox of some kind, a round softbox, or possibly an umbrella. So I can see that there is a light above her and a less powerful light below her. This is a…
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