From lessons learned in the studio
One of the earliest and most memorable of the lessons that I learned when working in a studio was how to set up the lights. That might come as no surprise until I explain that my mentor’s approach was rather unorthodox at the time but the philosophy behind his system is one that I have learned to use in every area of my photography, regardless of the location or light source.
Shift your thoughts from additive to subtractive lighting
The traditional way of setting up studio lights is to think in terms of positioning the key light then adding in various other lights such as hair light, back light, fill light, and so on. In other words, the emphasis is on where and how much light to throw on the subject. This is known as additive lighting. What I was taught was that in all aspects of photography the shadows are the most important part of the image. There are both technical and aesthetic reasons for this.
The technical reason is that the shadows contain more information than the highlights, which, if necessary, can be recovered during the D&P stage. In a busy studio this is an essential consideration because mistakes are costly. By concentrating on the shadows less mistakes are made and, if errors still creep in, then they are likely to be salvageable.
For me though, it is the aesthetic consideration that is more pertinent. I believe that the one thing that makes great photographs leap off the page is emotion — the more emotional content an image projects the more powerful it becomes — and it’s the darker areas of an image that pack the punch. By that, I don’t just mean that darker areas are more moody (although they can be), I also mean that shadows are a wonderful tool for drawing our eyes to the brighter parts of the image.
So, getting back to my lesson in the studio, instead of gradually adding light to the subject, I was taught to flood the subject in light and then to develop the shadows and the contours by adjusting the power of the lights, or by repositioning the lights, or by removing lights, or by any combination of the above. In other words, to add darkness. This is what is know as subtractive lighting.
Parting shot
It’s tempting to say that that’s all very well in the studio and has no place in the wider world but that would be to miss the point. By not pressing the shutter until we’ve learned to check the frame for our treatment of the shadows, we become better photographers. That’s logical because by checking how we treat the shadows forces us to think about what part the darker areas of our image are playing, i.e. their purpose within the overall composition.