Lighting a sculpture properly requires adherance to a few rules.
Like many lighting applications in photography, lighting sculptures requires the photographer to follow a few simple principles. Light is the most important technical aspect of any photograph, so knowing control light will enable you to make excellent images of sculpture, or anything else, for that matter. If you already know light portraits, you will find that many of the principles are the same.
Two-Point Lighting
When lighting a sculpture, or almost anything else, use two lights. This setup, called two-point lighting, is bound to produce the best results with the minimum of complications. It also prevents harsh shadows commonly found when using one-point lighting setups, which are especially undesirable when photographing sculpture.
Light Position
The positions of your lights is probably the most important element of lighting sculpture. In the same manner as portrait photography, you'll want each light to be positioned off your camera axis by a certain amount of degrees. To do this, draw an imaginary circle that passes through your camera lens. Then, position each light on the circle about 30 to 45 degrees away from the camera lens. This means that if two lines were drawn from the light and camera lens to the center of the imaginary circle, the angle formed would measure between 30 and 45 degrees.
Soft Lighting
In nearly all art reproduction applications, especially those involving three-dimensional objects like sculptures, the photographer will employ soft lighting. This is achieved by using lights that have been diffused in some way to soften the edges of the shadows, making them less notable to the viewer and therefore less distracting. You can do this with umbrellas, softboxes, with a homemade diffuser or by bouncing the light off of the ceiling or wall, but the goal is always the same: to soften the edges of the light and create unobtrusive, even illumination.
Hard lighting
In a few rare instances, it may be more appropriate to use hard lighting for your photographs of sculptures. This requires the use of non-diffused light, and is essentially the opposite of soft lighting. The sharp shadows produced using this technique are very dramatic but can also be very distracting. This makes light positioning even more important. You will have to adjust the position of your lights to avoid casting dark shadows across important elements of the sculpture, hiding them from view. When using this technique, also cover yourself by taking a few photographs with soft light.
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