Emotional Photography. Lighting Can Capture Emotion
Lighting is key to create emotional photography.
As a photographer, it is essential to make people feel something when they look at your photos. Lighting plays a crucial role in conveying emotions. In this video, I will teach you how to use exposure ratios and quality of light to create emotional photography.
#emotionalphotography #studiolighting #narrativephotography
Highlights
– What is the correct exposure in storytelling photography?
– Exposure ratios
– Quality of light
– Direction of light
Episode 1: How can you tell a story in 1 photo?
Episode 2: Narrative Composition.
Episode 3: Lighting for Emotional Impact.
Episode 4: How color can influence mood.
Episode 5: Creating a Storytelling Photoshoot from scratch.
You can also watch the whole ‘Storytelling for Photographers’ series on YouTube.
As a photographer, it is essential to make people feel something when they look at your photos. Lighting plays a crucial role in conveying emotions. In this video, I will teach you how to use exposure ratios and quality of light to create emotional photography.
What is Emotional Photography?
A story without emotion isn’t a story at all. That’s why lighting is so important in photography. An over-exposed or under-exposed photo lacks depth and character. To evoke emotions, we need to move away from the idea of technically correct exposure. An abundance of light is linked to positive emotions, while the absence of light is used to describe negative emotions.
Exposure Ratios
Dramatic visual storytelling tends to use higher exposure ratios that visually communicate the broader emotional range of the shows. The exposure ratio is the relationship between the highlight and shadow areas on your subject. It is the first step in using light to create an emotional response. Exposure ratio sets the mood.
Quality of Light
The quality of light is a spectrum that goes from soft light to hard light. Soft light is associated with positive emotions, making the subject look more vibrant and happy. Hard light is more intense, creating harsh boundaries between highlights and shadows. These harsher boundaries are quite aggressive statements and might imply a hard side to a character or an uncomfortable situation.
Direction of Light
The way you position your lights around your subject will affect how a viewer emotionally interprets your photo. A portrait photographer captures moments. Lighting is a way to add context and visually display the emotion in your story so your viewer feels it. That’s how you get people to engage with your work.
In conclusion, emotional photography is about making people feel something when they see your photos. Lighting plays an essential role in conveying emotions. Exposure ratios, quality of light, and the direction of light are crucial elements in creating emotional photography. Use them to add context and emotional depth to your photos and make your viewers engage with your work.
Takeways
1. Learn how lighting can convey emotions in your photography.
2. Understand exposure ratios and how they can set the mood of your photos.
3. Use the quality of light to create positive or negative emotions in your photos.
4. Experiment with the direction of light to add context and emotional depth to your photos.
5.Use lighting to visually display the emotion in your story so your viewer feels it.
Learn Narrative Photography with JP Stones
Join me on one of my award winning Photography Workshops in Mexico.
Watch my free online course: Storytelling for Photographers!
Emotional Photography Video Transcript
A story without emotion isn’t a story at all.
People need to ‘feel’ something when they see your photos. Because if they don’t feel anything, they don’t really care. That’s why you need to learn lighting for emotional impact
An over-exposed photo occurs when too much light from your scene is recorded by your camera sensor. An under-exposed photo occurs when not enough light is recorded. A correctly exposed photo is that sweet spot in the middle. But that way of thinking can be really limiting when you’re trying to tell a story and to evoke an emotional response.
A ‘correctly’ exposed photo has little depth or character. It’s not interesting, or mysterious. To tell a story you have to break away from this idea of a technically correct exposure and, instead learn how lighting conveys emotions. And it’s really not that hard to do. This is it, in a nutshell: “An abundance of light is linked to positive emotions, whereas the absence of light is used to describe negative emotions.”
This relationship between light and emotions is everywhere. Even our everyday language. Think of expressions like: “She lit up the room”, “He was in a dark mood”, or “You’re the light of my life!”.
Exposure Ratios
The exposure ratio is the relationship between the highlight and shadow areas on your subject. Dramatic visual storytelling tends to use higher exposure ratios that visually communicate the broader emotional range of the shows. The first step in using light to create an emotional response. Exposure ratio sets the mood.
Quality of Light
Our second topic is quality of light. Quality of light is a spectrum that goes from soft light to hard light. Soft light is primarily associated with positive emotions. It is more warm, welcoming and friendly. Because it comes from a larger source it wraps around the subject, bathing them in light. This smoothes out wrinkles and making them look younger. That extra light also reaches into the eyes makes the model look more vibrant, more happy and positive. Hard light is more intense. Because it comes from a smaller source, it can’t wrap around our model. That inability to light up some parts of the face is what creates those harsh boundaries between highlights and shadows.
From a storytelling perspective, these harsher boundaries are quite aggressive statements. They might imply a hard side to a character, or an uncomfortable situation. As a storyteller, you should think of these darker shadow areas as a space. A space where the character can be developed. Where you can add complexity. You can fill those spaces with whatever emotions you want. Mystery, fear, sadness…. You can’t do that in an evenly lit photo where everything is on display.
Direction of Light
The way you position your lights around your subject, both in a horizontal and vertical plane, will affect how a viewer emotionally interprets your photo. That’s why they are used, in conjunction with a low aspect ratio and a large light source, in fashion. They’re very flattering because the angle ensures as few shadows are created on the face. The large light source also erases any skin blemishes.
From a storytelling perspective, they’re not so uninteresting. There is no mystery, no drama here. But, when we move our light further to the side of our model – and keep a steep aspect ratio – things start to get more interesting. What if we want to step things up emotionally, and move from this light setup to something even more intense.
To do that we need to move the light up and above Dan so we can bring those shadows over his eyes and mouth. As humans, we make evaluations of primarily people based on their facial features. Are they smiling or angry? But if these features are hidden we become uncomfortable. And our evaluations skew to the negative.
Emotional Photography
As a portrait photographer, you’re capturing moments. One frame in a larger story. Sometimes those moments speak for themselves, but more often than not they need context. Lighting is a way to add that context. It’s a way to visually display the emotion in your story so your viewer feels it. That’s how you get people to really engage with your work.
No Comments