From the course: Advanced Photography: Flash
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Falloff, part 1
- The farther you go from a light source, the dimmer its light gets. That's pretty obvious. That's called falloff and as you'll recall our third question about a lighting instrument is how does its light fall off? Well I can tell you that the simple answer is it falls off much quicker than you probably think it does. You might have heard of something called the inverse square law. It comes up a lot in discussions of lighting. If you want to learn the math of it, that can be very interesting and there are plenty of places around the web that will teach you all of the details of the inverse square law. But you don't have to know those details to effectively light. If you want a shortcut, just remember that every time you double the distance to a light the effective illumination of that light is quartered. In other words, if I move a light twice as far away from my subject its brightness doesn't reduce by half, rather it is reduced to one quarter of what it was. Okay, even that's a…
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