Laws of Light: How Lighting Diagrams can IMPROVE Your Images

It’s about time we go over lighting diagrams and see how I’ve used them for 35 years and see how they’ll help you in the next 35 years of your lighting.

Let’s take a look!

I’ve been shooting commercially for almost 40 years, and in the beginning of that process, I just became completely obsessed with keeping track of my lighting.

Film documentation sheets is what I called them – on here I would write who I was shooting for, I would write down what the camera lens I was using was – it was basically metadata before they had metadata. When I was shooting on film, there was no metadata.

I would keep all the polaroids and then on the back draw a diagram that was exactly how I would set all the lighting up.

Every set that I’ve shot for 35 years, I have these elaborate drawings that show exactly what our lighting diagram was.

Donimos Pizza

Why did I do this? I was just obsessed with knowing how I was lighting things and if it was working or not. So I would go back and look at these if I was looking for ideas, see what works and what didn’t work, and just see what I had to do in order to move forward.

I was able to use my lighting diagrams to learn and grow from previous shoots.

PRE-META META EXAMPLE

Here’s exactly how I documented a shoot I did.

You’d see a little diagram of exactly how I set up all of the lights.

Listed this information:

Camera

Camera Lens

Feet from the subject matter

How far my camera is off the floor

No swings, no tilts

What type of film

How I developed it

Exposure – I used to have to get F22 on just about everything because on that 4/5 it was hard to get these big deep sets in focus

Available light exposure

As we moved into the digital world, that’s all changed now. I have the ability to put these into books that really become great lighting guides for me to look back on and teaching guides to really help other people understand what we’re doing here at TSL.

You see them in our videos, but at Saal Digital, we’ve put together a 12×12 handmade book. They’ve got this leatherette and acrylic cover that gives you a beautiful presentation. But what I love about it is I’ve turned this into my lighting diagram book!

Big difference is I’ve gone digital now!

LIGHTING DIAGRAMS AND BREAKDOWN

This dude had to lay on the floor for hours! We were at the YouTube space, and they had made a small water tank that he could lay on and we’ve got a lot of things going on in here.

Everything in here was hard directional light, to give us that sort of film noir feel.

We didn’t have a car in there so we put 2 lights as headlights and just like that, you have a car!

It’s so fun using just a few lights to bring an image to life.

You need to make these diagrams of the things you’re doing so you can keep track of what you’ve done. It allows you to look at what worked and what didn’t work.

ONE LIGHT AT A TIME

This really becomes a roadmap for me. It allows me to learn what’s going on.

Too many photographers, doing a scene like this, will just set up 3-4 lights and turn them all on and then they start taking images, and they never have any control. But if you set up 1 light at a time, look at it, analyze it, and then take some images with it to figure out if it works, THEN you add the next light and continue 1 light at a time.

I can take a look at this and it becomes a roadmap that allows me to know what I’ve done and it really opens doors for how I can improve things in the future.

I can’t tell you the number of time advertising clients when say “we loved how you did this, can you do something like that?” and if you can’t look back and know how to recreate it; your life is going to be pretty stressful.

ADDING SMOKE

Look at the difference that smoke does to these. We’ve got an M18 in the background, it gives us a silhouette on our couple, light to the left that gives us a bit of light on their backs, put some light in the foreground to put some light on the subjects, then a heavier light to fill out the image, and now we added smoke and the smoke changes this image completely!

So I’m hoping that your take away from this is that you’ll start recording the lighting for your images, so that it’ll help you learn what you’re doing and how you can improve it. It’s a roadmap – a look at your journey, which allows you to grow and progress in that process. You’ll be surprised how much you learn.

In our membership area on Patreon you can get this PDF and be able to make your own lighting diagrams. You’ll also get access to see what’s in these books as well.

Thank you to Saal Digital. They make gorgeous books with thick beautiful pages that produce gorgeous glossy images. They have a very simple process to make a book. It’s a drag and drop so you can drop you images into their layouts, or you can make your own and really make it fit your work.

CONCLUSION

So there’s a look at lighting diagrams and a bunch of what I’ve learned from 35 years of making them. It’s really the best way to track what you’ve done and learn and get better every year.

Keep those cameras rolling and keep on clickin.

GEAR USED:

Saal Digital: https://www.saal-digital.com/

Canon C200
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Canon 24-70 2.8
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Sony A7 RIII
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Canon EOS R
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Tamron 24-70mm 2.8 G2
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Tamron 28-75 2.8
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Tamron 17-28 2.8
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Vanguard VEO 2 Pro 263CPV
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Blackrapid strap
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