If there is one thing that defines photography, it's light. As obvious as this may seem, lighting is the single most important aspect about any photo, and I must admit, even after years of experience I still find myself forgetting about this occasionally.
My teacher used to tell me "light makes or breaks the picture", and simply by understanding light one can take a big leap ahead in their photography.
The photograph above was taken with 18 second exposure time and extremely small aperture of f/27 . I fired my external flash 5 times from different angles during the exposure.
So, what kind of difference does doing this really make? Take a look at this:
This is the same scene taken in regular room lighting, the difference is like a night and day. And I'm not talking about the obviously different looking cloth beneath the apples - that is just some clever editing I had to resort to because I didn't have the right kind of cloth at hand - I'm talking about the apples. Can you see how much more 3-dimensional they appear?
So, here is an illustration how the lighting in this scene works:
1: I fired the flash first at the curtains behind the apples to give the background some light
2+3: I fired the flash on both sides, behind the apples, in an angle to make the "hair light" effect.
4: Then I fired the flash from the left side, a little bit farther away for more even light
5: And finally I filled the shadow that was forming in front of the apples.
I obviously did a lot of image manipulation trickery as well, but the basis for any good photograph is good lighting regardless. Even image manipulation cannot save a badly lit picture.
If you found this post useful or you like the photograph, please consider resteeming and upvoting! It would really help me out. :) If you want to see more pictures and tips from me in the future, then simply follow. Thanks for reading, have a great day and may the light shine upon you!