Assignment 3: Portraits Using the Laws of Light

*I will refer to right and left based on the photographer's point of view*

Soft-spoken

In this portrait, we placed the bulb behind a large sheet of vellum. Since we know that light travels in a straight line, we knew that this would create a much larger, softer light source than just the small bare bulb. We also used a mirror to fill in the right side of her face. We positioned the mirror underneath the subject, at an angle. Since the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection light, we knew that the light would bounce up, and at the same angle at which it was hitting the mirror, softening the shadow in the portrait.

Confrontational

Here, we used a bare bulb to create rembrandt lighting from the top right of the photograph. In order to block lens flare, we placed a black flag between the light and the camera. We also used a white card (the angle of incidence = the angle of reflection) from below to slightly fill in the dark side of her face. We kept moving the white card farther away from the subject because we know from the inverse square law that light intensity falls off logarithmically with distance and I only wanted to fill the shadow slightly.