Improve Your Lighting by Learning How to Break Down Light

When you're new to artificial lighting, it can be a bit overwhelming trying to put together successful images using strobes. This helpful video will teach you how to break down light so you can successfully create the images you'd like when you're using flash.

Coming to you from Robert Hall Photography, this awesome video teaches you four properties of light to think about when you're constructing a setup for an image: brightness, direction, quality, and color. As Hall emphasizes, your eyes and brain are already well trained in reading and understanding light and making decisions based off those, and a lot of the struggle is simply learning to consciously connect and articulate what your brain already does automatically so you can control it in your own work. As he points out, part of the reason it's so important to understand these is because every time you make a photo using artificial light that also contains the sun or some other light source, you have to decide whether you want to augment the existing light or work against it as a stylistic choice, and to do either of those things, you need to know how to fashion your light to work with or against what's already there. Check out the video above for the full rundown.