Tamsin - CC please.

Walczak Photo wrote in post #5498029
Hey Robert,
I thank you for sharing your time, wisdom and experience! I'd like to pick your brain on one other quick issue if I may...

Ok...I can feel a brain synapse starting to fire on that one and on one level I do understand it, but it also raises a very dumb, very newbie question...

Let's assume that I'm shooting indoors next to a large North facing window on a very clear day...no haze, no clouds, bright blue sky. Now without the direct lighting of the sun (or any supplemental flash) since the sky is so big and so blue...why don't my shots come out with an intense blue hue to them? (BTW...I've never actually tried shooting this way and maybe they would end up really blue without any consideration to white balance, but that doesn't usually seem to be the case with other shots I've seen.) I know that when one shoots in shade, there is a tendency towards a blue shift with digitals, but I don't know if it actually happens with the situation I described.

I honestly have never taken up that issue. The main reason being that for me the window with the northern light is an abstraction - i.e., I've never consciously done any photography using a north light). Another reason is that 95% of my own photography over the past 60 years has been in B & W. My concern about the sky has been limited to whether I should use a yellow or an orange filter.

Light behaves more like line of sight radio waves than like sound waves. The propagation modes are quite different. Remember, radio waves and light waves travel quite nicely in a vacuum whereas sound waves won't travel in a vacuum at all. That probably has nothing to do with what you had in mind, anyway.

May I digress a bit more, since you struck a chord? I got my ham ticket in 1948 and worked as a studio engineer at WCSI, Columbus, IN and at WBAA, W. Lafayette, IN during college. I've had essentially the same hobbies of ham radio and photography all these years, and the really strange thing is the number of hams you find on the POTN.

I think once this whole thread is done, I'm going to print the whole thing out and hang on to it for posterity .

Peace,
Jim

Bob, W9DMK

Walczak Photo wrote in post #5491943
...the parabolic shape of an umbrella is going to effect light differently than a square diffused modifier such as a softbox.

An umbrella is not really parabolic which is a good thing ... if it were parabolic, or even close, then you would have a problem with sharp shadows caused by parallel light rays. An umbrella reflector tends to have much hotter light along the axis of the arm. Since the light is mounted off-axis, it would take some experimenting to find out how that affects the light distribution.

Moving any type of light source back by a few feet definitely will, as you state, decrease the direct lighting on the subject. But, it also means that more of the light is scattered around the room. Assuming that the walls and ceiling are white and not black, this scattered light means that the shadows on the subject will be softer because of this more diffuse lighting. How the overall subject lighting is affected depends on the light fall off from the source as a function of distance.

Roy Mathers wrote in post #5483609
Many thanks for you help Bob. Could I please just clarify some points?
What is Rembrandt lighting?

Roy,,here are some basic lighting techniques explained..

http://www.vividlight.​com/articles/1615.htm

Thanks Yogestee - very interesting.