A Comparative Look At Catch Lights by Robert Mitchell

Neil April 22nd, 2008

Robert Mitchell writes a lovely post at the Canon Digital Photography forums:

Catch lights are often discussed but rarely demonstrated, so I figured I would do some quick demos to illustrate catch lights as well as a few basic concepts of light. This is not a lesson or tutorial so I’ll only mention those concepts but won’t go into detailed explanations.

Here’s the setup. I’m using a 12″ blue ball to simulate the human eye. The background is white seamless and the subject is 4 feet from the background. The single light source was approximately 30 degrees off the camera’s axis and about 20 degrees up. Although 45 degrees is the preferred or common angle it simply can’t be done with an 8 foot ceiling at a distance of 8 feet from the subject. Once I established that 20 degrees was the maximum angle I kept that angle constant and changed the distance from light modifier to subject. Read through the whole post to complete thinking through the image below…

photo softbox Catchlight comparison

Robert Mitchell’s blog has a few more interesting points you might be interested in….

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