P#22 Q7A: Take Creative Control of Your Lighting

Keep it Simple

John Siskin: Go to a beauty supply store and buy a Styrofoam wig head. Yes, there are many other things you can get besides a Styrofoam wig head, but a Styrofoam wig head will cost you five dollars, maybe seven at the most.

Go to Home Depot or Lowe's and buy a couple of clamp lights. Then you can spend your time using the clamp lights and the wig head and develop a sort of a laboratory for learning lighting without having to go out and buy lights.

That being said, you probably are going to want to buy lights when you start shooting real people. The wig head is not a real subject. It won't complain. The wig head doesn't say, "I'm so hot under these lights. Can't I move?" The wig head doesn't say anything.

If you want to improve your wig head, go to the 99 cent store and buy a pair of reading glasses because it will tell you more about reflections. It gives you a laboratory environment for learning about light and for understanding how it works. Then when you decide that you want to invest in lighting, you already are ahead of the game because you know something about the way light works.

Light is not unpredictable. If you put a light in a certain place, it's going to give you reflections if the subjective is reflective so you have to know where those reflections are going to be. You can tell that. We're not going to do the math here, but it's simple.

When you put a light on one kind of material, it's going to act differently than another kind of material. All this stuff is stuff you can learn. None of it is brain surgery. All of it gets better if you take your time and really learn and practice.

One of the things that I notice about photographers is that they hate the idea that every picture they take isn't going to be beautiful. I take a lot of lousy pictures. I'm pretty sure that Eric Clapton and Luciano Pavarotti both practiced their craft and I have no objection to practicing my craft and to learning by doing things wrong. Then I take the information learned into the next shot that I make.

Say you have a mannequin face, you don't see the way the light is gradated as easily because the mannequin face is designed to look like human and the wig head isn't. You see how the features of the wig head are very subtle and you see how those features are defined by light.

If you can define the features by light on the wig head, you can do the same thing on a person.

Audri Lanford: You know, John, we've talked about an enormous number of different things today. Of everything we've talked about, I'd like to ask you what is the one thing that you most want our listeners to remember about lighting from today's interview that you feel will make the biggest difference in their lighting?

John Siskin: Hands down, it's the two and a half things about light. If you can really understand how those work together, you'll be able to learn lighting.

In Summary

Want to improve your creative control over light? By practicing with a wig head and remembering the two and a half rules John Siskin mentioned earlier, you can truly begin to understand the ins and the outs of how lighting works, giving you the ability to control it.