DECONSTRUCTING LIGHT
If imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, then photographers could well be some of the world’s best flatterers. Most of us love the challenge of recreating a photographic idea that we might have seen in a magazine or online, and while some photographers want to recreate an idea to make it their own, others want to mimic ideas just to learn from the inspiration of others.
One of the biggest challenges in recreating any photo, though, is getting the light right. Given enough resources, almost anyone can find a location where an image was made, or encourage a model to strike a similar pose, but understanding how the light was used to create an image can often be the hardest challenge of all.
A MIND EXERCISE
To understand just how complex lighting can be, imagine for a moment setting up a giant chequer-board in a studio, and then placing a subject in the middle of the board, with your camera somewhere along the edge. Now place a light source on any one of those 64 chequerboard squares. As you move the light from one square to another, the light on your subject will change. In fact, the light on your subject will be different for every one of those 64 squares that you move the light source to. As you move the light from left to right, or behind the subject, the modelling (the effect light
