So let's have a look at understanding light. Some of the basic principles we need to understand when we go into portrait photography is hard versus soft light, the light travels in a straight line, and the closer the light to the subject, the more light lands on the subject. But let's have a look at some illustrations that will help us to understand what we're talking about here. One of the first things we have to understand is part of life. What is hard light, Hard Light is light. That creates a very hard shadow.

So in this instance, we've got the sun in the sky, and it's creating a very hard shadow on a tree. Small light sources create hard shadows. And people get confused when they see the sun like this, because they know the sun is big, but they don't realize is actually A small light source when they use it for photography when it's in the sky, because it's very far away so becomes very small. And when we compare that to a large light source, what will happen is a large light source is, in this example a cloudy day, the sun is behind clouds. Now the clouds become the light source, the clouds diffuse the light. And then what we've now got is soft light wrapped around the tree which creates a soft shadow.

So soft light source will create a soft shadow. And when it comes to studio photography, if we use a bear flash is going to be a small light source and create harsh hard shadows and we might want that sometimes. But if we use a soft light source, maybe like an umbrella, or a softbox, then what we're going to get is a soft shadow on our subjects. And the other point we mentioned that we need to understand is this light travels in a straight line. Now, when light travels out, it doesn't all travel in exactly the same direction it fans out. But each light particle will travel straight from its source.

Now what gets interesting because at light spreads out especially most light sources, you're going to find that the light was spread out. If a subject is closer to the light, more light hits that, as you can see in this illustration, but the further they are away, less light hits them. Now we've illustrated in this in this instance, we've got seven rays of light now obviously there's a lot more than that, but we want to understand this. The seven rays of light, six of those rays of light The subject that's closest to the light. And then we move to the second subject. And we see that we're only got five.

But what we want to actually look at here is the portraiture. If we look at the first object, we've got 12345 rays of light hitting, by the time the second subject comes in, there's only free. Now this is a very simple way of explaining the inverse square law, which is some mathematical way of saying that the further you move your subject away from the light, the more light you lose. And in this instance, you can see that the subject closest to the light gets more light, and the subject further from the light gets less light. So when you're in a studio if you're struggling to get enough light on the subject, especially when we're using speed lights, which are not as powerful as studio strobes, Then we can see that by moving the subjects a little bit closer, we can compensate for that. So there are some important principles that we need to understand.

Hard, light, soft light, light travels in a straight line, and the closer the subject to the light, the more light hits the subject.