Anatomy of Hotel and Resort Photography;  A guide.

 

Episode 6;      Lighting – Chapter 1

 

Lighting for photography is always challenging and in the next few chapters we will look at why.  To start off, I think that we should look at what is light, what is it made of and how it works.

I believe that we take light for granted.  Light is always there during the day and not there at night.  We always see the effects of light.  We have also seen how it moves around.  Issac Newton in the 1600’s postulated that light was made up of particles or waves and left others to confirm this.  A Dutch physicist, Christian Huygens, didn’t agree with Newton and postulated that light was made up of waves and not particles.  Since Newton was so popular then, it took another 100 years before the wave theory was accepted.  To this day you are either in one camp or the other and sometimes in both.

According to the particle theory, reflection on light is very straightforward.  Light when it hits a mirror, arrives there as a stream of tiny particles, then bounces of the mirror’s surface.  According to the wave theory,  a light source gives off light waves that spread out in all directions.  If these waves hit a mirror, they reflect according to the angle of impact.

I’ve often wondered why light can’t be both particles and waves.  We will let the scholars figure this one out. I am however, always looking at what light does and how it does it. I’m always looking at the effect of light coming in a window and how it affects the room, the furniture, the carpets and even how it warms my dog that’s lying on the floor.

Light is absolutely spectacular and can be created, controlled and modified.

Okay, lets talk about the colour of light, or colour theory.

 

When we look a light we normally see it as white light.  However the opposite is true.

Light is a mixture of all the colours in the rainbow, basically the full spectrum. – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.  The reason why we see things in colour is because they are reflecting that colour and absorbing the rest.  An apple is green since it reflects green and absorbs all the other colours.  An orange is orange since it reflects orange and absorbs all the other colours. 

White light shone through a glass prism separates into its component colours.

Why is this important to hotel and resort photography?  We will have to check out the Kelvin temperature scale. Lord Kelvin in 1848 figured out that each colour had a certain temperature that could be measured.  His theories have become extremely important in the fields of photography, lighting, videography, publishing, astrophysics, etc.  The colour temperature of light is the temperature of an ideal black body radiator that radiates light of comparable hue to that of the light source. Okay, kind of confusing.  Simply put, colour temperatures over 5000K are called cool colours(blueish white) , while lower colour temperatures  (2700-3000k) are called warm colours .

The image on the left has the proper colour temperature while the one on the right does not.

In photography, the term colour temperature can be used interchangeably with “white balance.”  White balance allows for the remapping of colour values to simulate variations in ambient colour temperature.  Most digital cameras provide presets simulating ambient values such as,  sunny, cloudy, tungsten, flash, etc.,  Some cameras you can enter the white balance number you like, such as 3200k(the colour of a regular tungsten bulb) or 5600k ( the colour of daylight).

                                                                   

In both of these shots you can see incandescent colour, daylight, colour and even a little fluorescent colour. Therefore, the colours of the table,  chair,  plant, etc., is off.

I have simplified the concept so that we can look at how it affects our photography.

When I photograph an interior, I try to make all the light sources – wall sconces, table lamps, daylight coming in the windows – the same colour temperature by changing the light bulbs or by using conversion gels.  I usually convert all the light sources to true 3200K, which when the camera is properly white balanced, the image comes out the right colour.  Let’s say I don’t do this.  One lamp might have a fluorescent light bulb in it (which produces the most ghastly yellowish-green colour) and another has a regular tungsten bulb, then the interior will have competing light colour temperatures.  The furniture, drapes, carpet will not show as the proper colours they are.   One area of the will look greenish-yellow, while the other areas will look normal.  This can be a real problem so has to be considered before taking the shot.

This ceiling light has fluorescent lights in it and is very difficult to get a pleasing colour temperature out of it.  I would change these to regular incandescent(tungsten) bulbs.

Here you can see how the colour of daylight(bluish) affects the colour of the wooden wall>

Knowing the basics of colour theory you can be creative in its use as well.  The following restaurant shot in Mexico shows that with proper knowledge of the theory and proper use of lighting a pleasing balance between daylight and incandescent(tungsten) light can be found.