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left/right light \ B&W kids portrait
Almost all Renaissance and later portraiture uses light coming from the subject's right (viewer's left). This is simply not true. A broad survey of western painting shows only a slight bias toward portraits lit from the left (about a 55/45 split), with some painters favoring left, some right and some exhibiting no preference. In the early days before people read as much as we do these days, heck, before it was common for people to read, it didn't matter which side you placed the light. Today, since most all readers have a natural tendency to enter an image from the left side (this has been shown in studies were they use a laser to map where the eye is directed as it moves across a page. painters and early photographers used northlight studios and I would imagine the side it was placed depended on the shape of the room. Even more interesting is photographic portraiture, which shows a virtually even 50/50 distribution of left-right preference in a survey of fine art and commercial portraiture over the last 100 years. The only exceptions are certain amateurs and camera-club members who are unduly influenced by dogmatic rules telling them that the light must come from the left. use of right light in a commercial image is often a deliberate rule break to cause the eye to stop, commercial imagery often uses deliberately bad composition to cause the viewer to stop and mentally try and balance the composition, usually implanting the item in your brain. the use of a strong or contrasty right light can slow the eye down like a speed bump. at least for me |
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