Lighting Techniques in Still Life Shooting

Let me show you the lighting arrangement skills of still life shooting.

? Lighting arrangement skills for still life shooting 1, no lighting shooting: compare the original film.

The first is to put the glass in front of the white wall, and the shooting platform is a glass desktop. The camera has a good angle, so shoot it. We didn't do any lighting control here.

It's so dark ~ mm-hmm, think about it should be the problem of exposure compensation, because it's a white wall, and everyone knows that white increases and black decreases! Ok, let's take another picture!

It looks brighter, yes, but why is it still ugly?

Well, this is a bag that photographers may have when they have no feeling about the control of light. Of course, you may be lucky that the glass is in a place that suits her very well.

Let you get it, but as a photographer, how can you take pictures by getting it? !

Lighting skills in still life shooting II. Remove stray light and arrange a soft mask.

The first thing to do next is to eliminate the stray light that should not exist, that is, turn off all ambient light sources and use a shed lamp+soft mask to brighten the background to form a simple backlight. Do you understand what this is all about?

Wow! It's really much better than just now! At least those ugly reflections on the glass have disappeared, but? The edge of the glass doesn't seem so clear? So the next thing to do is to add its edges to both sides of the glass.

Lighting skills in still life shooting III. Place a black baffle around the mask.

In fact, the practice is to add two blackboards at the left and right rear of the glass. You can highlight the edges on both sides of the glass.

Look at the left and right sides of the glass, but it seems that the black edges on both sides of the glass are still not symmetrical, and the black edges on the left seem too thin! ? This problem comes from the glass itself, or the relative position relationship between camera, glass and blackboard. In other words, as long as the position of the glass and the board is adjusted, the thickness of these black edges can be adjusted!

Lighting skills of still life shooting iv. Control the background light and change the visual appearance of the glass.

Does the left and right black edges really look symmetrical after adjustment? But what seems to be missing? Generally, we want the glass to look a little layered, but the layer in the middle of the glass is actually? Background imaging? You can imagine that this shape of glass is somewhat like a lens. Therefore, to change the level of glass, it is necessary to polish the background instead of directly polishing the glass. Change the visual appearance of glass by controlling the background light?

With a small light source, the background light can have more light and shade levels than simply using a soft mask.

Everyone should have seen the difference in the shooting results! ? A little brighter in the middle of the glass is basically ok, but in fact, the edge of the glass can also be blackened.

The way is to take a blackboard to block the light above, and you should be able to see that the cup mouth is darkened.

Lighting techniques for still life shooting 5. Adjust refraction to deepen the blackness of glass edge.

But here, because of the angle of refraction, the blackboard in the picture will not be easy to avoid, so we are lazy to use the version with dark edges (because we can basically see the edges) for post-processing. Adjust the overall contrast slightly to make the layers more obvious, and then modify the details to complete the glass photo. Although all this seemed easy, the first time I shot glass, I totally suffered. The bitterness of this is probably only known when you shoot it yourself! )

Lighting skills for still life shooting VI. Compare the original picture and sum up the experience.

You should find that the existence of glass is actually controlled by the whole lighting environment. Once the lighting environment is changed, the visual appearance of glass will also change, which is why this example is particularly easy to make people feel that photography = painting with light. Of course, no matter what materials have different effects in different light, this problem always exists. Photographers should consciously control or use light when shooting any material, otherwise how can it be counted as photography?