Lesson 5: Introduction to Lighting + Vintage Reenactment Portrait

Date: 29 March 2013

This week, we learnt a bit about studio lighting. We were taught about the basic types of lighting, main, fill, hair, rim and background lighting. Besides that, we were also lectured about strobe light photography and how to create a 'bouncing flash'.

We did not learn too much about lighting as Mr. Vinod said that it is a subject on its own and is too extensive to be added to our module, which only touches the tip of the iceberg when it comes to photography.

How to determine the position of the studio lighting.

How to identify what sort of lighting is used for portraiture.

How to use lighting properly.

In summary, the built in camera flash is nothing but a tool to make portraits look unflattering! Hooray for studio lighting!

We had a lot of fun with this assignment. We were told to do research on portraits from the 1940's and reenact it. We learned about art direction, which includes how use studio lighting, composition and posing, make-up and shadows... the like.

I learnt how to control studio lighting for this mini-project. It was tiring, but fun!

I was the first 'victim' for this project. This is the photo I chose to reenact, and the final product:

Me as a fighter pilot (on the right.) Pretty neat, huh?

I edited my portrait using Adobe Photoshop. I did not alter the photo, but only enhanced the parts that required it. Firstly, I corrected the exposure according to what I learnt from the zone system to make the portrait more vibrant and attractive. I added a texture to make the photo as similar as possible to the original. Then, I corrected some of the shadows on my face to match the original photo. I wanted to remove the blemishes from my face (pimples, gosh!) but in the end I did not because it was not too obvious and I had spent a lot of time editing the photograph.

— Hidayah