Light ― Science & Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting

The bible for lighting when it comes to photography, plenty of explanations and photos to help you understand the science of light. If you’re new to lighting setups, make sure to read this book before you try or buy any kit.

As a photographer this really fascinating book gives great insights into how light behaves.

Best book for portrait and product photography lighting

Very interesting book with a scientific approach to lighting but without beeing excessively technical.

Quite simply the bible of photographic lighting and studio photography. Incredible detail and examples covering every type of material. This is not about styling and props, it's all about the the camera position, lighting and type of object you are shooting. It's a technical book, but comes alive from the page through clear the criting and excellent images throughout.

Explica muito bem

Lots of great info in this book. Everything you need to know about lighting.

There is a lot of useful information in this book. There is a lot on light theory. The section on unwanted reflections is essential to understand. There are however simpler software angle and perspective corrections which solve this specific problem much more easily. You do however need to already know the theory, so the section is still useful, just longer than it needs to be if the use of software to allow deliberate perspective offset shooting for later correction in Photoshop etc had been explained. The portrait section on lighting is a good introduction but it leaves so much unexplored. Any book which did this really thoroughly would however be huge with no room for other topics. I would have liked to have seen more on portrait genres. There is quite a bit on product photography which is useful if you are interested in still life and advertising work. The changing array of light modifiers does tend to make any book potentially out of date before it is completed. I bought the Kindle edition and that has its own advantages and disadvantages. I prefer a printed book you can hold. The benefits are the annotations you can make via highlighting etc and searches. Being able to zoom to read the small text helps. Some photos seemed to have an excessive yellow cast but on a screen you cannot be sure if that is the book or your own settings. If a book is in electronic form the possibility of links to video clips and even gifs to compare settings seem like something worth including. RECOMMENDED as an essential reference.

This book teaches you how to think about light and color. It explains how to achieve different photographs using lighting theory. It's technical enough for students looking for textbook reference information, but easy enough to read for the beginner as well. This has been the best photography book I have read yet. When you learn how to setup the photo, you usually take a better one.

The main point of lighting, boiled down to a single idea, is the family of angles created by reflection - and this book covers the topic in great depth. The authors provide a wide range of practical advice for handling a range of the challenging photo scenarios. The book also covers a wide range of information such that I imagine everyone can learn something. I really enjoyed it, despite being a "text-book" I read it's 300 pages in under a week, so it's fairly easy reading material. One complaint I have is I found some of the diagrams to be a little confusing - some images are drawn or seem to be drawn in a top down perspective while other objects in the same diagram seem to be from a different perspective. It's possible I misunderstood what the diagram was trying to depict, so the fault may be my own. Nevertheless it wasn't such a significant issue to dock a star from the rating. I found the book to be incredibly informative with both the theory and concepts behind the techniques and great practical information for executing the techniques themselves. Hard to imagine a better book exists about lighting in photography - Light science and magic sets the bar sufficiently high.