“See”-ing Light?

When I first started reading photography books and blogs, one of the comments I noticed from the pros was you have to be able to “see” the light.

At the time I could not “see” or even think about what I was missing when looking for the light. So there I was struggling away to “see” light. After months trying to learn more from the internet, I found two great sources of information that allowed me to finally explain the concept.

The two sources that I found helpful on this were Drew Gardener's DVD (the one with the Water Buffalo in) and also a foreign technical blog (Krolop-Gerst).

In the Drew Gardner DVD he shows his lighting setup light by light this enables him to “see” what each light is doing and to build the picture from there.

see the trailer below

The foreign blog really put everything in to perspective in terms of “seeing” light as far as a two dimension picture is concerned. On the website they showed the build up a picture using multiple strobes by using a Photoshop coloured overlay to show what each light was doing e.g. below. The simplicity of this diagram really showed me what I need to be looking at as far as a two dimension portrait and what my lights were doing for my subject.

To see the Krolop-Gerst setup shoot see here 

Here is my effort on the lighting diagram with a different colour for each light (Blue as key and Yellow as the accent light): -

And the final image of Hanah-Marie: -

So now when I take an image on the back of my camera I am imaging the bad crayon drawing to see what the light is doing. Anyways that what I do, I hope this helps you in the future.