No lights in the frame

In this lighting exercise all our lights are not visible by the camera. Make this way of working your habit. Photographers have no choice but to be ingenious about placing light in a way that is not visible by the camera. The fact that we can make a light invisible by a trick of the software should not be something that you rely on. Because we are used to not seeing lights in the frame, if a source of light is in the frame and we can't see it, that will be potentially jarring for our brain. It will not look correct.

Recently, I was playing a videogame on my PS3, my character on screen crawling inside an air duct. In the middle of an intersection between two ducts, I noticed a much brighter splash of light. I looked for the source—maybe there was an opening in the duct or maybe there was a light installed—but I could not find any light source. Nevertheless, a spotlight was clearly placed above my head. Even professional game developers fall into the...