Lighting Eggsercise

This is "Project 27" from Michael Freeman's "Photoschool", a quick little exercise in lighting direction.  I was a bit sceptical that there would be much to learn from this, but it didn't take long to do.  It was surprisingly fun to do, and made me realise that the desk lamp that I'd bought for photography was actually pretty versatile, with an excellent head on it that makes it easy to point in the right direction.

The point of the exercise is to demonstrate the fundamentals of controlling lighting direction.  The book suggests using an egg, which is a nice simple subject that everyone has to hand.

Top lighting

Right Side Lighting

Left side lighting

Left 3/4 side lighting

Left 3/4 side back lighting

Front lighting

Back lighting

Bottom lighting

The most surprising thing was that the one direction that I expected to be the easiest (front lighting) was actually the most challanging.  I was using my 50mm lens with a close up filter fitted so that the egg would fill most of the frame.  These are all full frame shots.  This meant that my camera was in the way when I tried to get the light coming in from the front, so my front lighting example is more like a "front 3/4 top" lighting example.

The back lighting was a bit tricky, but expected that.  The main reason for the difficulty was that my lamp has a large 100W spotlight bulb and I was trying to block it completely with the egg.  I'm not even sure if I was successful!