Anyway, Ross Lowell is a camera man/lighting director who's been around for a while and I really like his approach to the subject. He treats lighting as a craft that's independent of the medium that you choose. This book teaches lighting for film, video, and stills by showing you basic principals that apply to all mediums. The book is full of Ross Lowell (and other photographers) excellent photos illustrating various types of lighting.

This book isn't a real easy read... at least not as easy as I thought it would be. If you really want to understand lighting, here's my recommendation. Buy this book, request a Lowel catelog via the web, read Lighting for Digital Video (can be found here at amazon.com), and request a lighting catelog from B&H. Study both catelogs and read both books. You should also try to pick up the different kinds of basic lights from Ebay so you can expiriment and do some of the excercises found in this book.

This book also contains an awesome glossary that contains all the lighting terms you could ever want defined. Albeit, some of the definitions are rather useless (see Lighthand). Another great thing is that the author doesn't use this book as an excuse to plug his lighting supplies like he could have.

One last thing. If you are a still photographer that only plans on using strobes for your lighting and have little or no interest in video, film, or continuous lighting... you may not like this book or find it very useful. However, if you're like me and shoot video and take pictures you'll love it.

45 of 49 found the following review helpful:


a List view on lighting  Nov 20, 2005 By Rick Wise
I admire Ross Lowell's inventions enormously. His lights, while not as robust as others and so not so well suited to rental houses, are a great tool for the beginning owner-operator. I began with his Lowel Lights and moved up to his D-heads. I remember them all fondly, even though I no longer use them.

After many years as a director of photography, I've begun to teach lighting and have been looking at book options for my students. So far the best book I've found on this topic is Blain Brown's "Motion Picture and Video Lighting". While the layout of Lowell's book is stunning, as are many of the images, Lowell approaches each section with long lists which to my mind do nothing to inspire the thinking eye. With great respect for Lowell, I regretfully report that for me his book is for the encyclopediast, not for the emerging eye.

11 of 12 found the following review helpful:


An up-to-date, hands-on cinematography/photography book  Aug 05, 1997
With lots of pictures, clear text, and a detailed hands-on exercise section, this book quickly brings you up to fine quality photo, movie, or video production. Highly recommended for those of us who would like to create professional-looking photos and movies

6 of 6 found the following review helpful:


Excellent Survey & Starting Point  Jan 03, 2007 By G. L. Stone "gman"
This is a great starter book to get if you have never done any lighting before - whether for video, cinema, or still photography. Lots of great tips and tricks that typically are missing from other lighting books. Lowell takes the concepts and precepts of lighting and presents them in abstract form so that you can adapt them to whatever lighting situation you may have. This book may not work for you if you are the kind of person who needs step by step how-to in order to get things done - in fact it is debatable that ANY book could do so effectively because every shoot is unique. But if you are good at thinking intuitively and abstractly then his presentation of the material is great because it teaches principals (with some examples) and not technique.

My one complaint is the typsetting of the book. The use of a modern typeface makes reading difficult (looks like a bodoni variant). The publishers should really re-publish the book to make it more legible.

3 of 3 found the following review helpful:


Enlightenment about Lighting  Oct 10, 2005 By Sherman Hirsh "obscure genius"
I've read a lot of books about lighting. Most are very good at teaching the practical uses of lights under normal circunstances. There are books on the practicalities of Film lighting, Still lighting and Video lighting. Lowell's book goes beyond being a cookbook for lighting solutions, and is the first book that gives a comprehensive overview of lighting relative to all media and resources. Film teachers would find it an effective text, over and above its value as manual.

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