if you've ever mucked around with a flashlight before you probably already know that direction can drastically change how something is perceived and that is the topic for part one of the lighting series direction so if i was to ask you what is this shape you say it's a circle what if i said what is its three-dimensional shape well you probably couldn't tell me right because we can't see its form and the reason we can't see its form is because of the lighting now you might guess that it's a it's a sphere but it could just as easily be a cone it could be a flat disc it could be a cylinder lit from the top could be some weird wobbly shape or it could be a sphere so the new information that we're getting on the right hand side there is shadow and that shadow is created by the direction the direction creates the shadow which helps us understand the form so the first lesson and very important point to remember is that you shouldn't fear shadow shadow is your friend it's just as equally as important as the light because without the shadow we're not able to understand the form we're not able to actually see the image to which you are trying to uh perceive to we're not able to understand things right um or to give a more uh practical example say you went to the trouble of creating this hulking uh dude you spent all these weeks and months you know sculpting out the pecs and all that kind of thing but then you lit him like this that would be a mistake lighting from the front is the easiest way to flatten form and unfortunately we can't see all that detail if we move that light to the top left hand corner it's only then with the introduction of shadow that we're able to understand its form you're able to see the shadow underneath the pecs the six-pack the veins in his arms the bulge um it's revealing all this information to us which we couldn't see before so the shadow is incredibly important and that's all done by the direction of the light obviously um however if you have uh ever looked at yourself in the mirror before you left the house and thought looking good or looking as best as i'll ever look and then caught a glance at your reflection in maybe the elevator mirror you probably also know that shadows can sometimes be undesirable so shadows will reveal form but it can also reveal undesirable forms if you're not careful so let's talk about it starting at the top with the the first light which is flat front lighting if you put the light directly behind the camera aka flash lighting this is why flashes on cameras typically make things look flat um you get this effect right we can understand that it's a face but not much more than that we're very good at recognizing faces so we know it's a human but like you know how big is her nose is she pinocchio we don't actually know this like how far back is her ears or the cheek definition we can't see a lot of information here we're just sort of almost seeing like a trace outline of basic features that's about it however having said this like yes it's flattening and it's pretty undesirable for most cases there is situations where you would want a light from the front and you think about it say for example you were photographing a uh an elaborate costume or a or something like that with a unique pattern and you just wanted to show the pattern you wouldn't want to see shadow you wouldn't want to see the form you would just want to see that pattern or maybe you were doing a photo shoot for somebody with a tattoo where the tattoos were the focal point maybe you don't want to see shadow you would use flat lighting so very rare but there is cases where you would want to have flat light so that's lighting from the front now watch what happens if we move that light up and just slightly back we now have something much more desirable so this is called paramount lighting or butterfly lighting i want to avoid just giving you these terms because then you're just sort of remembering like the word like oh paramount oh that was cool how do i do that and instead of like learning what it's actually doing and why it's desirable um so this was i guess created from paramount pictures which is where the names come from as just very glamorous lighting but the reason it's glamorous is because uh you're giving just a small amount of shadows you can see just like how big the nose is uh the lips uh the the chin obviously there's there's separation between the head and the neck um the uh the cheek bones but most importantly of all you are still able to see the eyes which is crucial here so for many reasons it is used a lot in fashion photography fashion beauty glamour shots now this is obviously this example here is using a lot softer lighting which we'll talk about in the next part um but the position of that light is uh is what's important here it's it's creating just just enough shadow just so that you can understand the face better but not like undesirable shadows and also by the way i should say that this is relative to the direction of the head because we're talking about the light on the head so if you've yeah your shoulders are facing here but your head is to the side then yeah if you had the light directly above you would have totally different things so it's the the light is basically above you like that wherever the head is turning that's that's what we're talking about here um anyway so let's talk about undesirable if we move this light back just slightly we now have something horrible and this was that example of when you look at yourself in an elevator reflection and you've got these hard circles underneath your eyes very undesirable because obviously the eyes of the window to the soul and we can't see them when the light is coming directly into it they're thrown that the only thing thrown directly into into shadow which is horrible it also is going to highlight a lot of shadows in it like the the crow's nest very undesirable way to to light a face but something else and i only just noticed this just the other day but it also makes the face look like something else and think about it look at it what does that kind of look like it looks a little bit like a skull so i got no proof that this is why it has this kind of effect but it does look like a skull there's no eyes there and it's just uh i don't know i i feel like that's that's probably part of it but i would say most of all it's just you know highlighting the wrong things and not being able to see the eyes um but there are cases where you might want this like if you're making a movie like star wars and you've got darth sidious um if that's his name i don't know if that's his name darth sidious right um who i think they used makeup they actually emphasized it even more so that even when the light was like coming underneath him um his eyes were still like dark pockets right um so yeah making somebody look evil it could be desirable in in in that sense you want to make them look dark almost dead like a skull go for it um there are also situations where for the environment that you're in it would make sense to have light coming directly above like in this scene from the zodiac where they're sitting across at a restaurant and there's like a pendant light directly above them right it you got to sort of think about the situation and the style of movie you were making but in that situation maybe it would make sense to have dark pockets under the eyes even then though you can see they've used a soft light and maybe a little bit of fill so that you can still actually see the eyes in there so anyway it's it's not it's not good it's called raccoon lighting sometimes because it makes you look like a raccoon pretty undesirable pretty much the worst thing ever but anyway now if we move that light even further back then we see even less information now we've got all we can see is the silhouette and this can be it's used a lot in movies for obvious reasons that you don't know who the character is so at the start of blade runner when ryan gosling invites himself into this guy's house and the guy arrives and is like oh who is this person he's an intruder is he here for ulterior motives is he friendly is he foe we don't know and it's kind of a like a mysterious sort of look later on when you meet um harrison ford the exact same thing he's in silhouette and it's kind of i think it's it's undesirable because as humans we want to be able to read someone we want to be able to identify them and and read their expression and not being able to see any of that is very chilling it's like friend or foe like who is this person so you know again might make sense for if you're making a movie but if you i don't know trying to show off a character that you sculpted this would just about be like the most um uh impractical or like not revealing anything useful to the viewer at all okay now move the light around to the side and you have what's called split lighting which is obviously half half the face in line the other half in shadow and really i i feel like this is just a combination of two things it's revealing something and it's hiding something it's not showing too much form we're not seeing any form like underneath the cheeks or like the eye ridge it's kind of flattening from the obviously one side of the face but it's sometimes used when i guess you're trying to make somebody look like they've got something to hide i don't know if that's reading too much into it it might be um i it's called split lighting because it's just split but there's also cases where a character is sitting next to a window in a movie and you've got split lighting i don't think it's necessarily evil mysterious whatever i just think it's it's it's hiding something but it's revealing something and you know that's about it now swing that light around way underneath and you have the classic uh torch uh underneath the face that you know you tell scary ghost stories with now i was kind of interested in this because i i first heard about this effect from the universal principles of design book that said that the reason that this looks unnatural is because we live on planet earth where the sun is always above us and so having light coming from underneath us looks um it doesn't look right however when i was thinking about i was like i don't know if that's true because the bounce lighting is a thing and light hits the ground and bounces off it so we sometimes have light coming from underneath us so i'm like why does it actually look creepy um so i even like asked on the psychology stack exchange i asked on ask science on reddit didn't get really any responses some people on twitter did though um and uh somebody pointed out that it does kind of look like a skull which i think is true that nose shape there it's the exact shape that you have with a skull it's the empty because cartilage deteriorates you have like an empty hole in your face so it makes it look like that um and then obviously it's used in movies um for horror films horror scary that kind of thing somebody else pointed out that it's kind of like it's highlighting the brow of the uh like the eyebrows which can kind of make you look angry and mad so i think it's like you're not able to kind of read their their face it kind of makes them look mad they're kind of like a skull and it's unnatural because light usually comes from above us so therefore it's just unpleasant try walking into a job interview hi how you going and trying like a light underneath your face that's a terrible example but you're gonna you're gonna be off-putting for a number of reasons in that situation anyway swing that light all the way to the top left-hand corner and you have what is just neutral light it's um you're able to understand the face very well because you've got not only from above but also from the side just a slight amount of of shadows in all the right places that you can best read the form pretty well that little triangle on the cheek there's sometimes called rembrandt lighting i don't want you to remember these terms just think about like what you're doing to the face um it's used a lot in movies right because it's just a neutral way to show a character underneath the ceiling light or underneath the environment light whatever it is um obviously in this example using soft light which we'll get to but um but yeah it's uh there was a note in universal principles of design that said that um 75 of paintings in the louvre have lighting coming from the top left hand corner which i don't think necessarily means it's like the secret thing you got to do it's probably also a sign of maybe the painters are all right-handed they didn't have artificial lights they had to do it in the daytime so therefore i had the light had to come through a window or something i don't know but anyways it's just an interesting tidbit i thought i'd throw in there to waste your time um anyway so light direction when it comes to faces it all depends on what you want to say it's it's a catalog it's not like any of these things is wrong and you should never do it it's going to be right and wrong depending on the the circumstances you're making a movie with a creepy character do all the the weird creepy stuff if you're trying to make somebody look desirable and interesting then do all the good stuff right so depends on what it is you are going for now when it comes to environments though because obviously environments are totally different to faces faces is more about like psychology environments is you know you're showing an environment to someone so it's still about form so when i made this picture i deliberately put the sun in the background with harsh shadows coming across the uh that rock face there because the tutorial was on cliffs which you could watch if you wanted to um but i i really wanted to detail that that rocky cliff face so i i positioned it there but most of the time when it comes to environments it's more so about just time of day and and signaling that right so when it's noon obviously the sun is directly above us it's hot and it generally tends to flatten things because of the volume right we're not able to see the shape of these trees very well it's just kind of flat and harsh and it says more to me about like oh heat and like off-putting than really much about form um later in the day as the light reclines into this uh in lower into the sky um you get a lot more um interesting shadows and we'll talk about this in the next part when we talk about like uh the golden hour but uh this is where you can really basically change where the shadows are appearing and when you swing that light around you're really emphasizing different parts of the image and you're guiding the viewer to different things so this is why i think that that lighting when it comes to environments and architecture it's it's more so about the composition and where you're guiding or unintentionally guiding people to just through the light direction so i think that's more important um than really like form although that does play a part as well to use another example for for architecture so this is just like blue lighting and you're just sort of seeing it from a neutral sort of view it's blue it's morning whatever maybe there's a bit of feel and atmosphere from that but throw a light in the background and now you're looking at the corridor in the background looking straight down the right hand side there move the light over and now you're looking at the chairs right so you're guiding the eyes to that thing get rid of the sun altogether and then turn on some counter top lights and now you're looking at the food on the counter right so it's more so about composition than it is a really about form although obviously there is some form in there as well if things were completely blinded flashlight from the camera then you wouldn't really be able to see or understand things very well but mostly it's about composition so environments yeah form mostly composition as i just said so remember though the takeaway from this video is is not to think of these like recipes of like oh what was the paramount lighting you know like think of th remember that direction is creating the shadow and the shadow is revealing the form and it's going to reveal form and it might be an undesirable form if you're not careful so you want to reveal the right forms think about what message you're trying to say and then what shadow is going to reveal that the best way okay so that was part one guys hope you liked it um in the next video we're going to be talking about size in part two which you can click there and watch or if you're watching this at the time that i'm uploading them they're going to be every week so you might have to wait click subscribe so that you get notified when it is released and if you liked it guys please give it a a thumbs up so that others can find it as well and i'll see you in the next video