We were given exercises and scenarios to create. It wasn't so much of mimicking but really trying to achieve certain forms of lighting and learning what effects different lights bring.
One of the exercises was to light an object up without creating shadows. We thought it was going to be difficult but we figured the trick to doing that from experimenting and putting together different lights and filters. And the trick was to shine soft light on the object and that would create a very faint shadow or no shadow at all. So if you saw the picture on the right, we bounced light off a styrofoam board and further soften the light with a diffusers. At the end, the whole setup looked like some science experiment.
Then we were given the exercise to create sunlight. For that, many of us automatically grabbed HMIs. HMIs are lights that are made to literally produce light of similar colour temperature as the sun. To make it look like the evening sun, we added an orange gel, the proper name being Colour Temperature Orange (CTB). (Something we found out not too long ago as well.)
The following lesson was a lot more challenging. We were given commercial ads that had models posed nicely. And we had to identify the setup that was used to achieve the look. This was more of a mimic now, but it taught us pretty well, because we had to learn from experience. So we had some of us posed and then we put up the lights. Overall, we did pretty decent jobs and I can't emphasise it more; that we learnt a lot.
Then we lit up glassware, with reference to beer ads. It was pretty interesting and another challenge altogether. I remember a lesson I had last semester, about 3-point lighting and also colour temperature.
image from wikipedia3-point lighting is almost like a standard setup. How we achieve different stuff is really based on creativity, on working around. There isn't really a hard and fast fixed method to achieving anything.
This entry would probably serve to remind me of the lessons in lighting. It was a module truly appreciated.
