I realised I really needed to learn about lighting when I was taking live photographs of Edinburgh based band Lipsync for a Lullaby. The local venues the band was playing in were very dark. Since the low light capabilities of the camera I had at the time weren’t that great, I definitely needed some additional light to take decent quality photographs.
My job as I saw it was to take a variety of shots during the performance, from close-ups to photographs of the whole band. Therefore, I had to figure out a way to set up my small flashes in such a way that the lighting would work in all these cases. I usually set up three lights, one to the left of the stage, one to the right, and since I’m a big fan of back light, one at the back. The venues where the band played were typically rather bland colourwise, so I started experimenting with coloured gels on my flashes. My favourite set up consisted in using the three primary colours, red, blue and yellow for maximum colour contrast.
In the above photo, one can definitely infer that there is ‘blue’ light coming from camera left, ‘red’ light coming from camera right while the ‘yellow’ light at the back is visible in the frame.
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