In my mind lighting is something that’s being done. It’s an activity/process that photographers can engage in.
Light is something that stimulates our sight and makes things visible.
Before we can improve our lighting, we need to understand light.
That tree that we see is light.
The reason we can see that tree is because the sun is “lighting” the tree. In this case, I’m observing light.
The sun provides the light, the tree reflects the light that the sun provides. We can observe the light and, as photographers, we may choose to take out a camera make a photograph of that light. If we choose to make a photograph of the tree, We’ve now gone from observing light to recording light with a camera. That’s what photographers do, we observe and record light.
On a very basic level of “lighting”, If we’re in a relatively dark room and we wanna brighten the object in the room so we can see them easier (improve the lighting), as photographers, we can say we are “lighting” the room by turning on the lights.
If we know how, we can also use a flash during our activity of “lighting”.