Building thirteen is not a very well placed building for lighting interiors. Considering there is no direct sunlight in the room, the light seems to change profound in the two hours we have class inside the room.

Our first exercise, controlling available light by positioning only the camera and the subject, interestingly, is probably the most relevant exercise to our practise that I could think of. In most cases, students aren’t running around with lights.

On just about every shoot I’ve ever been a part of, the positioning of the subject and camera are more about setting and story than anything else, (the director wants this character on a chair in the corner looking at this wall, etc.) lighting has become somewhat of an afterthought in the process. However, the more I think about lighting in the context of this class, I’m discovering in just talking about the lighting in the second class of the week, lighting can inform so much of how an audience experiences a story, not just make it look pretty.

One of the things that I really love is Robin’s focus on camera. It’s not just about understanding lighting outside the box. It’s not enough to just put some lights up and look at it and make judgements about how it looks.

In my job, I spend a lot of time lighting stages for live events and really, my introduction to lighting was in theatre and theatrical lighting. The relationship between the way lights appear in the world and how they appear in camera is fascinating. I have always understood that perhaps, because the camera lacks dynamic range, the images would be more contrasty, there is something to be said about the fact that you can’t stop down your eyes. If lighting encompasses the control you have in the camera, then of course there are numbers of factors at play.

I love that in the first week of this class we’ve had more practical teaching than I think I may have had in the first two years of my degree, and for that, I am immensely grateful.