What Is Light Fall Off? | Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey

Gavin Hoey

Gavin Hoey is a freelance photographer, writer and trainer of all things photographic. His work is regularly featured in photography magazines, websites and videos.
Gavin has a real passion for sharing his photography and Photoshop knowledge. In 2008 he started recording and uploading video tutorials to YouTube. These quickly gained a large following and to date his videos have been viewed over 20 million times.
In 2010 Gavin was the winner of Adobe’s “Next Photoshop Evangelist” competition and since then he has given training demonstrations in Photoshop, Lightroom and Photoshop Elements in the UK, Europe and the US.
In 2012 Gavin joined forces with Adorama as a presenter on Adorama TV, where he inspires and teaches photographers from around the world in the art of photography and post processing.

One of the many properties of light is the predictable way it becomes less and less bright the further it travels from its source. Scientifically this is often called the inverse square law. Photographer Gavin Hoey has no time mathematics in his small home studio, thtough. So he’s got a far more visual way to demonstrate exactly how light fall off in the real world.

As Gavin explains, understanding how fast or slow light falls off is an essential lighting skill for any photographer who needs to take control of a scene. Light fall off can be used to create areas with even illumination, giving your subject the freedom to move, or you can use rapid light fall off as a way to create a scene with high contrast.

After Gavin has covered the technical side of light fall off he sets up a simple shoot using a large black and white parabolic umbrella. Using his understanding of light fall off, Gavin able to correctly light his models head but allow the studio floor to become underexposed without the need for post-processing.

Interested in learning more about lighting and lighting setups? Check out these guides on 42 West:

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