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Book Review: Light Science & Magic

Nelya often gets upset at me because I often prefer to buy books rather than get them from the library.  With the exception of technical books for work – which go out of date quickly – I prefer to buy books and read them over long periods of time than have the books for only a few short weeks.  In addition, I often refer to books in the future.  Still, a number of times she does have a point.

However, Light: Science and Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting is not one of those books.  This is a book that you will refer over and over to and is well worth the investment.  In fact, in my opinion this book is required reading.  It is not for beginners, but anyone who hopes to understand light at all should have it.

First, let me stress again that this book is not for beginners.  It assumes that you already know the basics of photography and how to properly expose a picture.  What it doesn’t assume, however, is that you know anything about light.

 

The great thing about this book is that it works hard to make you understand the principles behind lighting.  While it does give a variety of lighting setups for different purposes, it goes into detail about why the lights are setup in that way.  The goal of the book is not for you to memorize a number of lighting setups, but for you to know the principles behind lighting so you can create your own arrangements.

Amazingly, the principles behind lighting are well covered in the first fifty pages.  The rest of the book is spent covering these principles for different applications.  This is not a book to casually read while in a noisy room.  I found myself often rereading paragraphs and thinking while reading as many of the setups do become complex.

The main principles behind lighting, quoting directly from the book are.

1. The effective size of the light source is the single most important decision in lighting a photograph.
2. Three types of reflection are possible from any surface.  They determine why any surface looks the way it does.
3. Some of these reflections occur only if light strikes the surface from within a limited family of angles.

The three types of reflection are diffused, direct, and polarized.  In essence, the rest of the book spends it time discussing these principles in detail and how they apply to different types of material.  These sound simple and easy to understand, but there are a number of gotchas in practice.

From there, each chapter covers a different type of material and how the principles relate to it.  The materials slowly increase in complexity, so the book is best read from cover to cover.  All types of lighting are covered – from product photography, to portraits, to interior and exterior lighting.  Again, the main focus of the book is not for you to learn what type of lighting to use in each situation, but to understand the principles of lighting so you can know how to setup the lights for distinct situations.

This book works equally well for those who work with strobes vs traveling lights.  A chapter at the end is devoted to traveling lights, but the principles apply to both.  I do find myself wanting large strobes after reading this, though.  At the very least you truly understand the differences between large and small lights and I found myself wanting to setup my own studio after reading this.

Currently product and portrait photography are not large parts of my arsenal, though I have applied many of the ideas and principles in this book to macro photography – particularly understanding direct vs diffused reflection and the family of angles when choosing how to light an insect given its exterior.  When I do move more to portraits and products, I will reference this book often and reread the specific chapters.

This is one of those books that is worth rereading occasionally.  With many other books I find that I have moved on after a time.  I have grown to understand the material well enough that rereading the book isn’t worth the time.  That is not the case with this book, as I suspect even lighting masters will pick something up with each new rereading.

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Tags: book, light, lighting, magic, photography, review, Science