Summary

This chapter showed an important concept about lighting: interesting lighting is defined by the contrast of shadow and light. There are situations where it makes sense to flood the scene with lots of light but there is a difference between "lots of light" and "flat light". Light needs to match the mood of the story. In fact light can define the mood of the story for the viewer, but the mood is created first in the mind of the artist. The mood of the story is a combination of elements. The frame is one of them. Lighting is another.

While we talked about framing and lighting, we didn't address the strange, absurd quality of the materials in the scene presented. We don't quite know what type of fabric is used for the jacket. Why is it so shiny? It doesn't matter for now, what is important is that we now know how to set up lights and how to obtain a PNG file.

Compare the first image that we have rendered, the one with one single spotlight, with the last one and you'll see how much fun...