14controlling light
HARD LIGHT AND SOFT LIGHT
The most fundamental and consistently used way in which we control our lighting is by making it varying degrees of hard or soft. As we discussed in the last chapter, hard light is the natural output of any small source, such as a Fresnel light. As the source gets bigger, the light get softer. For this reason, an LED light panel is softer, but not a great deal softer. Since creating light sources that are many feet across is impractical in most cases, the most frequently used methods are to bounce the light off a larger (usually white) surface, sometimes a white ceiling or wall can make a convenient bounce.
The other method is to aim the light through diffusion; we’ll look at several examples of ...
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