Yes, light is essential for a photographer... light and shadows... Whatever the amplifying ISO capability of a camera, it won't create shadow without light. And shadows suggest the third dimension and they are a way to structure an image.
There are some basic observations to do. They are different types of lights: the small apparent surface and the large apparent surface. The sun is a very large emitter, its surface is huge but it's far away therefore its apparent surface is small. Small apparent surface lighting is said hard because the resulting shadows have a crisp frontier. Because shadows suggest 3D, even of the small details are accentuated because of the contrasted shadows, like roughness of the skin imperfections. Conversely, soft boxes, large surface LED lamps or screen made by the clouds in the sky, yield almost no shadows, and therefore details are attenuated.
Depending on the shape of a light emitter, the illuminated area is more or less large: if the shape looks like a cup with small apparent emitting surface or if the light is concentrated by a Fresnel lens, the illuminated area will be narrow and because of the emitting surface, the light will be hard as said before. Conversely, if the emitter is a small lighting ball, the light will be hard too but the illuminated area much larger (it requires then more lighting power). In the same way for large apparent surface emitters, lighting balls will distribute more the light than other large emitters.
Let's switch now from theory to experiment. A strobe has been used with different light modeler to change the distribution of the light. The strobe is a cobra strobe installed in a Bowens mount for all the experiments. All the light modelers can be bound to the Bowens mount.
The light modelers with a small apparent surface are a cup (top, experiments 4, 5, 6, 7, 8), a snoot with its grid (upper right corner, experiments 10, 11), the white cloth diffuser (center, experiments 5) and 4 grids of different sizes for the cup reflector (left, experiments 6, 7, 8).
Among the small modeler, there is a lighting ball whose diameter is 14cm (on the right, experiment 9) and a Fresnel lens for concentrating the light on the left (experiments 13, 14).
A 115cm soft box is used for large apparent surface emitter (experiment 15, 16, 17, 20) and a 60cm big lighting ball is also used (experiment 19).
The following table depicts the experiments done and the conclusions (results are presented hereafter).
The resulting pictures are below.
A enlargement on the frontier between shadow and illuminated area is given.
A 100% zoom on the face of the doll is then given.
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