This past week I’ve had two large assignments surrounding the idea of lighting in photography and film. The first assignment was my photography one, in which I designed and constructed a Ringlight for my photos. A ringlight is a piece of equipment (in this case, a colander, a small plastic bowl, some cardboard, a bit of foil, and a ton of duct tape) that throws light onto your subject in a ring form. This is done to minimize any sort of shadows on the subject’s face.

I followed these instructions, but had to compensate for the fact that I had almost no tools. Instead of drilling holes of any sort, I had to heat my colander and plastic bowl over the stove first, then thwack at it with the sharp end of a hammer. I did this during one of the World Series game (Woo! Go Sox!) and definitely looked like an idiot. I must say though, I was a bit surprised when my downstairs neighbor came and knocked on my door complaining about the banging and asked if I could do it “during the commercials.” I understood.

So, I took some photos with it on both film and digital. The film ones came out beautifully, but sadly they are drying right now. Here are some of the digital ones:

And here’s the ringlight in a reflection of my mirror (with me as a dork):

To see more, check out the Flickr set I made for it.

Meanwhile, for my FILM 1 class, we were assigned to do a lighting test project using a Bolex camera with 16mm TRI-X Reversal film. If you don’t know what any of that means, it doesn’t really matter. Basically we (my group and I) shot this on a film camera– one of those dealies with the cranking and the filming!

We had to light the scene (duh. it’s a lighting test), and do it at different contrast ratios. It’s pretty evident in the (relatively successful) outcome:

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Lighting is fun, huh?