The Complete Guide to Light: 07/21/19

The Complete Guide to Light by Mark Cleghorn is a how to book for photographers who want to move beyond just trusting their equipment to do all the thinking. His focus is on light and lighting. He is a professional portrait and wedding photographer based out of Cardiff. His book is very definitely focused on lighting for portraiture.

This book is a good starting point for understanding the philosophy behind photographic equipment. It also goes into depth on the coveted 18% gray — that bland (excuse me, neutral gray) that all good photographs should be exposed around.

If you want to focus on portraits — especially portraits of light skinned models, the formulae in this book will steer you in the right direction. But after an entire book of these recipes I found them all being variations on the same vanilla result. He has a style and he's built a successful career around it.

For the more experimentally minded, look to the recipes in this book as a starting point. They aren't the only way to photograph. You can over or under expose things for artistic reasons. You can shoot to a different temperature than the environment you're shooting in. You can find your own way of "breaking the rules" to make your own rules and your own style. Doing, that, though, isn't in this book.

Two stars

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