Understanding these four characteristics of light — quantity, quality, color temperature, and direction — won’t magically make you a better photographer. The information is important, sure, but it is useless unless you are prepared to take it from the theoretical to the practical.

The perception of color is often described by referring to three dimensions of the color experiences: hue, saturation, and brightness.

1. Light waves have three important physical characteristics related to psychological experience: wave amplitude, wavelength, and wave purity. 2. Wave amplitude refers to the intensity or brightness of light.

The physical properties of light are intensity (or quantity), direction, wavelength (or colour), polarity and coherence. Intensity is in simple terms the brightness of light, at least if you ignore that the human eye is more sensitive to some colours than others.

The direction of your light plays a role in how audiences will perceive the subject and environment in a scene as well. That’s because the light distorts the features on our faces with long, hard shadows making us look scary. The same idea applies to other light positions in relation to a subject.

Defining Mood Mood is the emotional atmosphere of a scene. It is the way the story, setting, or scene make your readers feel and can be the difference between an unsuccessful and successful one. An unsuccessful scene is one lacking emotion unintentionally; it feels more like a list of facts.

The lighting setup guides the eye to a specific actor, prop, or part of a scene. Lighting reflects the psychology of characters. The amount, size, color, and harshness of light surrounding a character can be adjusted to match their emotions. Lighting defines and supports the genre of the film.

When applied to the cinema, mise-en-scène refers to everything that appears before the camera and its arrangement—composition, sets, props, actors, costumes, and lighting.

The term is borrowed from a French theatrical expression, meaning roughly “put into the scene”. In other words, mise-en-scène describes the stuff in the frame and the way it is shown and arranged. We have organized this page according to four general areas: setting, lighting, costume and staging.

To help you analyse as well as understand a scene, you have to ask who and what are in the scene and consider their relative position. And mise-en-scène isn’t only the placement of people and objects within a shot; don’t forget make-up, costumes, backdrops, sounds and lighting.

Four aspects of mise-en-scene which overlap the physical art of the theatre are setting, costume, lighting and movement of figures. Control of these elements provides the director an opportunity to stage events.