Studio Lighting is a setup used in photography that can take your work to a whole new level. It is mainly used for portraits however, it can be used for many other things such as food, objects and general items. The images simply records patterns of light, colour and shade and it may not seem like it but, lighting is important in controlling an image. In some cases, the direction, brightness and colour of the light are manipulated in order to create a strong effect. By changing a few things, your images go from one thing to something much stronger. By changing the type of lighting, it can really change the emotion of the object that you are capturing- even if the object itself creates no type of emotion. I think lighting is important in studio's as you can have a person that has lots of emotion within them however, the lighting may not make the emotion come across clearly. Likewise with an object, if the 'thing' is emotionless, you could create an emotion and change someone's perspective about something.
Types of light:
The image above has five sources of light within it. Background: The room has standard lighting that illuminates the room and the backdrop. This is important since without a backdrop, your image can have unwanted shadows and other objects in the way. Spotlight: The spotlight (black light on tripod situated on the left) provides direct light. This is used for basic lighting and normally focused directly on the subject. Softboxes: The two white squares is translucent fabric over a lamp. This creates a soft, diffused, main light over the subject. You can change the brightness of these which generally changes the mood of the image Umbrella: The umbrella reflects a spot light and it can be used in portraits. It could be a strobe (flash) light to put some bright 'key' light on a models face which would create a standard portrait of them against a white background. Reflector: A reflector is a gold circle which can reflect light into dark areas. If you were to place it under someone's chin, it would remove the shadowing and this allows you tocreate the shadows that you desire.
Testing it out (first attempt)
I tested studio lighting and had a set-up. There was a chair for someone to model and a white screen was behind it. Directly in-front was the camera on a tripod with the same settings throughout the shots. On either side were two lights, one with an umbrella and a standard studio light. During the experiment, I made changes to the lights to show how the brightness can affect the mood and emotions in a picture.