CHAPTER 12 Lighting for Television Artistic Reasons Lighting plays a major part in how we interpret what we see. Even when structure and outline give us leading clues, the play of light and shade strongly influences our judgments of size, shape, distance, surface texture, and contours. Lighting is strongly associated with mood. Through care- fully chosen light direction and contrast, you can change a scene's entire atmosphere. It can portray fun, fantasy, mys- tery, or dramatic tension. Lighting can enhance a setting and create pictorial beauty, or it can deliberately create a harsh, unattractive setting. You can use light selectively to emphasize certain aspects of the scene while subduing others, or avoiding or reduc- ing distracting features. You can exaggerate form, and draw attention to texture or suppress it. Through shadow formations, lighting can suggest structures that do not exist, or hide what is there. FIGURE 12.2 Shooting outdoors often requires the use of lights to lighten the shadows or to illuminate the talent against a bright background. (Photo by THE NATURE OF LIGHT Light can be applied with large "brush strokes," or with fine delicate attention to detail. It can