Exercise 37: Softening the Light

After wrapping up most of the unfinish business in assignment 2, I am ready to move on to do something new. There is still no news from my tutor on assignment 3, so I will start on section 4. I am doing it in more or less reverse order. Since I have my flash unit set up for the re-shoots, I am using them for the photographic light section.

In this exercise, I will take photographs on a still life arrangement, one with hard light, another with diffused light. I have my tiger doll with some nice colour and texture on the table. 


First with the soft light.

Then with the hard light.

The clear difference of the images are in the shadow. The hard light casts more solid shadow. It is hard to maintain the tiger at exactly the same position because it is too soft to stand on the table on its own.


From the lighting textbook, it says the texture will be shown better if hard light will be used, and the colour will be more vivid. In the colour standpoint, I can't really see the difference of two. For texture, we have to zoom closer.


I pick the area just below the chin to look at. This is from the soft light.

This is from the hard light.

Again, the difference is not that obvious. I wonder if the meaning of texture is if you are doing portrait, the nose of a person is something stick out of the face. In this example, the tiger is more or less flat. It has "texture" in the furs, but the light cannot make this small "texture" stands out.


The soft light one seems to make the toy more round (look at the shade change on the lower right side). The tiger looks rounder around the base than the one with hard light.


Personally, I prefer the image with the hard light. The position of the tiger that it right eye has a catch light (very small, but it is there). The catch light make it more lively.