Book recommendations?

[Amanda0102]

To learn about lighting?

I want to understand ambient light first before artificial...curious if there's a great written resource.

TIA!

[RichardTaylor]

For a good general intro to all kinds of lighting see.

Complete Guide To Light And Lighting In Digital Photography
By Michael Freeman
FORMAT: Paperback

and for an excellent technical introduction:

Light: Science and Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting
Fishpond.com.au : Light - Science and Magic, Steven Biver Fil Hunter - Shop Online for Books in Australia

[zona5101]

big +1 on the light:science and magic book

[inkista]

Light: Science & Magic is great, but it's for lighting something, either with continuous or strobes.

For mastering ambient exposure, you want Bryan Peterson's Understanding Exposure. The thing about available light and ambient, is that you don't have a lot of control over direction, amount, or quality of the light. You have to discriminate from what's there in front of you.

"Artificial" lighting lets you choose the direction, amount, and quality. So they're two very different disciplines: it's the difference between finding something and building something.