Natural light portraiture is hugely popular. The light source is free, malleable, and available anywhere. Mastering its use requires a specific skill set, however. Fortunately, Tony Corbell is up to the task of showing readers how to harness its full power. He sets a foundation for mastering this powerful source, beginning with a discussion on how to set camera controls to ensure the right amount of light is allowed to strike the image sensor to create the portrait and how to read a histogram to ensure that a subject-appropriate (versus so-called “correct”) exposure results. Next, he moves on to discuss light quantity and quality and how each can be modified and manipulated to produce dimensional, lifelike portraits. Readers will learn techniques for using hard/soft light, working with window light, ensuring a proper white balance (so that colors in the scene are true-to-life in the final image), and adding or subtracting light to achieve the desired effect. Corbell’s images and instructions show readers how to produce the flattering, highly salable portraits they’re after—indoors and out.

Lighting and shadows are used within a range of art forms to create aesthetic effects. Piotr Sadowski's study of light and shadow in Weimar cinema and contemporaneous visual arts is underpinned by the evolutionary semiotic theories of indexicality and iconicity. These theories explain the unique communicative and emotive power of light and shadow when used in contemporary indexical media including the shadow theatre, silhouette portraits, camera obscura, photography and film. In particular, Sadowski highlights the aesthetic and emotional significance of shadows. The 'cast shadow', as an indexical sign, maintains a physical connection with its near-present referent, such as a hidden person, stimulating a viewer's imagination and provoking responses including anxiety or curiosity. The 'cinematic shadow' plays a stylistic role, by enhancing image texture, depth of field, and tonal contrast of cinematic moments. Such enhancements are especially important in monochromatic films, and Sadowski interweaves the book with accounts of seminal Weimar cinema moments. Sadowski's book is distinctive for combining historical materials and theoretical approaches to develop a deeper understanding of Weimar cinema and other contemporary art forms. The Semiotics of Light and Shadows is an ideal resource for both scholars and students working in linguistics, semiotics, film, media, and visual arts.

In the past the focus of urban illumination has been purely functional. Designing with Light and Shadow, however, is a treatise on the work of Kaoru Mende + Lighting Planners Associates, a Japanese firm, which purposely creates spaces to leave a lasting

This book is a scholarly inquiry into several dimensions of culture, exploring the close relationship between architecture and metaphysical ideas as well as religious and philosophical concepts in each period of human history, a relationship which has, however, been largely forgotten or neglected by modernity. Rather than being a specialized account of any particular epoch, it is an intellectual attempt to map out a general picture of how certain ideas have made their way into architectural structures or shaped them in one or another way, from classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the present. The four essays it contains, focusing on light, water, color, and sound in architecture, are written by an author who is a historian and critic of architecture as well as literary scholar, who firmly believes in the value of discussing these issues from the perspective of the history of ideas. The author is conscious about the limits of any generalizations, but he believes that architecture should be studied not only as an art in its own right, but as something larger, enveloping many layers of culture and reflecting the bonds between human thinking and the practice of the art of building.