Introduction to Studio Portraiture

1. Beginners guide portrait sales sketched : hi and welcome to the absolute Beginner's Guide to Studio Portraiture. I'm sure you're here because you have an interest in learning portrait photography. Are you a photography enthusiast wishing to photograph family and friends simply for the fun of it? Or maybe you're an aspiring photographer with a dream of opening your own portrait studio and photographing for profit. Whatever your reasons, this course will show you how to create fabulous portrait in a studio or any indoor location, even your living room. My name is Charlie born in, and I've been a professional photographer for more than 30 years. During my career, I have photographed thousands of portrait's for individuals, corporations, businesses and magazines. The's portrait sessions included corporate CEOs, famous athletes, politicians, employees, teenagers, Children and family. And the list goes on. This experience is the foundation for this course on how to create fabulous studio portrait . I've designed it for those who know nothing about portrait photography. If you are wondering if this course is right for you, then here a few questions to ponder. Do you know why you would use an umbrella over a light box or how to light a background? You know, how to control highlights and shadows. Do you understand what a knockout background is or how to create lighting that features your subject in a dignified manner? What about studio strobes? Do you fully understand how they work in this course is lectures. I will show you how the lighting equipment works, how to essentially sculpt your subjects with light in a complementary fashion, and how to apply what we call accent lighting that makes your subjects look fabulous. You will learn how to create simple Porteous using 123 or more lights. We'll show you how to like different backgrounds to create the right look for your subject and how to photograph headshots to full length portrait. I've also included a guide to posing heads and hands, and then we finish off with a little portrait retouching. This course is content contains videos, written lectures, all illustrated with lighting diagrams to show exactly where the lights were placed. By the time you complete this course, you will understand your lighting equipment inside. Now you will understand how to choose the right light modifier for a specific light quality . How to create beautiful lighting for individual headshots. Small groups of people, couples and pretty much anybody you wish to photograph. And there's a free download listing my equipment recommendations. In case you don't have any studio lights yet, I'm confident by the time you finish this course, you will be photographing beautiful portrait's off all types of people and maybe even getting paid to do so. 2. 1 1 Understanding Light Pt 1: lighting is a key ingredient when defining a successful photo without light, there would be no photography or really life as we know it. Think of how light affects the world around us. The landscape is shaped by light and gives us a visual story in showing the layout of the land by defining textures within the landscape. In the studio, lighting a portrait provides the visual information about that person, like the color of their hair, the shape of their face, the color of their eyes and in a lot of ways, it tells us who they are. Lighting is used very successfully in photographing products in which the photo entices us to buy that product. Lighting techniques make food look better to US cars more appealing. Ah, model sexier. So in this lesson, we're going to discuss the variety of different types of light, light, quality and lighting direction. Available Light is known as ambient light. This is the light that exists, and it's constant. Sure, in some cases it's a light weaken turn off like a ceiling light in a room, but it's usually a continuous light source. It could be sunlight light from a street light light from lamps in our living room, lights in an office or even lights in the place you work. But it's always the light source that is constant and can also be looked at as the light that you may or may not have control over its adjustment. Mastering light is most important to the portrait photographer. Like painters who create a three dimensional look with different shades of paint, the photographer essentially paints their subject with light, creating highlights and shadows that shaped their subjects. Supplemental or secondary light is strobe or flash, but it can also be what's known as hot lights. Strobes are flash units and hot lights, and also today, cold lights are constant lights. In both cases, you can set up these lights and move them in and out of your photography. Set up strobe lights are by far the most commonly used type of supplemental light used in portrait photography. Strobe lights also have the ability to change their output level of the light that is emitted during each flash by an adjustment of the power settings. Hot lights and cold lights can also usually be adjusted by a control, making them brighter or dimmer. But in the case of hot lights, changing the power or the brightness to the light itself changes the color temperature. Here's just one example of using light to create an effect. And, of course, it's not a portrait photograph, but it is a camping photograph. A flash was used toe light their faces, which you cannot see the flash unit to simulate campfire light. So it's just one way of manipulating flash to create an effect, and we're going to talk so much more about all of this coming up. Now, we're gonna look at light quality in regards to soft light versus hard light. The quality of light is often described as how hard or how soft. The shadows created by that light source are a soft, light and hard light are determined by the size of the light source in relationship to the size of the subject. Generally, the larger, more diffused the light source, the softer the light quality and the softer edges on the shadows. As an example, if you have hard sunlight on your subject, the shadows are going to have hard edges like the scenic photo here. But when a cloud comes over the sun. A huge diffuser has been placed over the light source, which is the sun, and the shadows become much softer when you place a diffuser in front of a hard light source and close to it. The shadow cast by the subject are almost as hard as if there was no diffuser at all. But the further you move the diffuser away from the light source and closer to the subject , the softer the shadows become. The idea here is that the larger the light source in relation to the subject, the softer the quality of light. Take a look at these two photos here I have a diffuser leaning against the light source. So when the strobe fires, it's on Lee going to have a small spot of light on that diffuser. So it is diffusing the light a little bit as it's on its way toe lighting the products here . But look at the photo of the products. Notice how hard the shadows are. This is very contrast delight. Now I've taken that same large diffuser and moved it much closer to the product and much further from the strope. Now notice the shadows and how soft they are. This reinforces what I've been saying. The larger the light source in relationship to the subject, the softer the light quality is going to be. So now you might be wondering, Why is this important? Well, the reason is you must be able to determine the best quality of light that you want to create. That's going to show off the subjects features. That's what mastering portrait lighting is all about. Now we'll take a look at highlights. Both speculator and diffused speculate. Highlights are described as spot, hot spot or mirror like while diffused are usually wide and soft. Here we're talking about highlights rather than light quality. Imagine that you're shooting a car in front of the house and the sun is shining on it when you walk around the car looking for the best angle to photograph it. A hot spot of the sun appears on the car. It could be on the hood. It could be on the windshield. It could be anywhere that you see the sun reflecting. Now come back to the same car and look at it. When the sky is overcast, there will be no hot spot, but rather, one large soft highlight. Here's an example of two products in the studio to illustrate this point. The difference between speculator and diffused highlights is the size of the highlight, but also notice on the left photograph. The speculum highlight has a shadow cast behind the bottle where the diffused highlight does not. The speculum highlight on the left was created with a strobe, using just the raw silver reflector without any light modifier. While the diffused highlight on the right was created using a large lightbox, the difference is again the spot or the raw reflector on the strobe. Creating the speculum highlight on the bottle does not send light wrapping around the bottle, while the light box is much larger than the bottle and subsequently it's a lot softer and it's wrapping light around it, so that eliminates the shadow that's indicated in the first picture on the left, with the speculum highlight. Now let's look at light quality flat versus contrast. Flat light has a shorter relationship between highlights and shadows, so imagine white and black objects sitting on a white background. If the light is soft and diffused, which is also referred to as flat light. There will most likely not be a pure black or a pure white within the subject. Contrast, the light has a more extreme range between shadows and highlights the same subjects with hard light used us. A light source will probably have a pure black area in the shadows or on the subject and a white highlight. And if you look at these two pictures, you can see some examples. The photograph on the left, which has a white cup in it and a black phone, really has a great cup and a very dark grey phone. But when using contrast, delight as in a raw strobe with a sober reflector on it. You have a white cup and you have a black phone. But you also have strong shadows, and you'll learn later how this plays into portrait photography. So now are you wondering again, Why was that important? Flat light is very soft light. While contrast, the light is often harsh, like Rahsaan or stage lighting that might be seen indoors. If you want a soft quality light to show your subject, then you will shoot in a flatter quality of light. If you want a stage lighting, contrast, delight, look, Then you will choose a light that is harsher or delivers a more harsher light quality. Now let's go on to the next video. 3. 1 2 Understanding Light Pt 2: Now we're gonna take a look at lighting direction. Light comes from all directions, and a such creates a variety of different lighting looks. Light direction controls the shape and directions of the shadows, and it's the shadows that define the subject. The texture and the form of who were photographing lighting direction defines the difference between those highlights and shadows and, as such comes from all sides and all angles. But it's usually defined in the case of portraiture as sidelight, backlight, front, light, top light and so on. If you take a look at these four pictures, the image on the left is front light mostly highlight very little shadow. The second from the less is 45 degree angle, and here you can see more shadow and a little less highlight. The second from the right, is side lighting. Here we have about a 50 50 split between shadows and highlights, and then the fourth image on the right is backlit. Here. The front of the subject is all in shadow, with little bits of highlights showing on the product. All of these lighting angles are useful in portrait photography, and you're going to see a little bit more how we can add light using each of these different lighting angles. Here are four photographs that show the same lighting angles used on products and Portrait's The Left portrait is frontal beauty lighting very flat, mostly highlights with a little bit of shadow. The second image is a 45 degree portrait using just a key light and a background light. But no Phil. Here you can see sidelight. With the subject facing away from the camera, sidelining becomes a more natural approach toe lighting the front of their face. And then, finally, a silhouette here is backlit. I don't normally consider this a portrait, but it does give you an idea of the backlighting and the silhouette of a subject, and we'll look at more backlighting techniques coming up. Another important photographic property is what's called angle of incidence. The angle of incidence when using light is an important aspect about lighting, and you really should understand it when a light source emitting light reaches an object at a specific angle. That light is then bounced off the subject at exactly the same angle. When the sun is at a certain point in the sky and it shines light onto a specific surface, and let's say it's hitting water on a lake surface, and the angle that the sun is at to that surface is 45 degrees than the light bouncing off the lake. Or the water surface will also be at a 45 degree angle. Here's a more practical explanation of how that works. Let's say you're inside. You're gonna take a picture of a friend standing in front of a large window, and you have on your camera a flash unit. When you take the picture, your flash sends light straight at the subject, which is also going to hit the glass window and bounces light right back into your lens in the form of a hot spot on the window. This is because the angle of incidence is equal and at the same angle as the light source is from the camera, meaning the light comes out of the camera, goes and hits the glass and bounces right back into the lens. This is a bad angle of incidence in case you're wondering. So the answer to this problem is to move left or right, and as you can see in this diagram, moving the camera to the right, and then the light coming out of the flash unit Hitting the glass is going to cast off a different direction, and what that really means is that hot spot. The glass is going to be out of view of the camera. So here, let's take a look. In a practical example, I have a phone sitting on a white surface, and the umbrella that's lighting it is coming down, hitting the surface and bouncing into the lens. And that's what's creating the hot spot on the phone and the hot spot on the table surface . But if you move the light back, or I could have also moved the camera two different height, the angle of incidence has changed. And subsequently, if you look at the phone here again, the hot spot on the phone is gone, and the hot spot that was in the surface is great, real adduced and, for the most part, gone as well. So now you might be wondering, Why is this important? Well, let's take a look. Consider this example. If you need to photograph executives in a conference room, and there's a giant window behind them, and your client has asked you to photograph everybody so that they can see the city skyline out the window behind them and you set up an umbrella. It's going to create a reflection in the window, so the only way you'll be able to do this is to either change the camera position so that it's not looking straight at the window. Or you're going to need to move the umbrellas out of the picture a little bit further so that the reflection created in the window is moved out of the frame of what your camera is seeing. In other words, you're changing the angle of incidence so that you don't get a hot spot behind them. And here's an example of exactly the same thing I'm talking about. I had to move my umbrellas way back. Angle of incidence is also the problem we get When we're photographing people with glasses , you have to move your lights around to minimise the reflections. So here we go one more technical consideration, and it's called the Inverse Square Law. And again, when you're talking the fundamentals lighting this is important as well. The inverse square law refers to the illumination of a light source and how it varies inversely by the square of the distance from the light source. And you're probably sitting there going, huh? Well, I'll explain it. In layman's terms, when you move a light away from the subject with light is going to fall off. Let's say you have a light source that's three feet from your subject, as seen in these two pictures on the left, the light sources three feet from the subject. But when I doubled the distance of the light from the product to six feet, the product no longer is receiving half the amount of light it's on Lee receiving 25% of the light. Doubling the distance cuts the light by about 75% and you have a darker picture. So if you're photographing porch, it's in the studio and you decide to move a lighting closer or move a light back. You're either going to be putting more light on your subject, making them brighter. If you get it closer or if you move it back, the lights gonna fall off and you're going to in need to increase power to get the equivalent of where you were at before you move the light as faras exposure and brightness . So let's move on to the next video now. 4. 1 3 Understanding Light Pt 3: when you're working with strobe lights and am yet light, there are some strategies that you can use in controlling the light, and that's the key toe lighting. Anything is having total control. So here are the fundamental concepts behind lighting. One of the most important things to understand right off the bat is when you're using a camera with strobe lights. You forget about all the automated features of your camera. I'm speaking of strokes and not T TL based flash systems. Those air automatic metering systems. But generally most strobe lighting kits that you'll be using in the studio are not T TL featured studio strokes, so I'll say it again. Forget about all the automated features that you normally use with a flash on your camera. You don't want to use program mode. You don't want to use aperture priority mode. You don't want to use shutter priority mode when you're doing studio portrait with strobe lights and umbrellas and light boxes, and so one you want to use manual shooting mode on your camera, meaning manual adjustment of the aperture manual, adjustment of the shutter speed as well and mawr importantly than that, forget completely about your in camera meter. Think about this. Your in camera meter Onley measures ambient light. It does not measure the strobe light, or it does not help you achieve on automatic reading of your strobe exposure. So from this point on, you'll be using manual shooting mode in your camera, manually setting your aperture manually, setting your shutter speed and manually adjusting your strokes. And again, I'll explain it very briefly. The strobes that you most likely are using are not going to be made by your camera manufacturer. If you're using brawn color are balle car or alien bees or anything like that. If you're using flash units designed by your camera manufacturer, that's a different story. But if you're using large strobes in the studio, they're not going to talk to your camera so you don't have any of those automatic features . Now, if this is somewhat challenging to understand, it really is quite simple. So I'm gonna go on to the first technical concept around lighting and exposure and shutter speeds and F stops. So this first fundamental rule is the shutter. Speed on your camera controls the length of time that light is allowed to expose your picture again. Shutter speed controls the length of time that light is allowed to expose your picture. Now your F stop. Our aperture on Li controls the amount of light that exposes your picture. You go to a wider aperture. You get more light. You go to a smaller aperture. You get less light when using the exact same shutter speed. So here's another way to look at it. I drew this timeline, which is designed to depict how long a shutter speed is. So let's say that 1/60 of a second is depicted as three inches long. Then 1 125th would be 1.5 inches long because it's half the amount of time that 1/60 this. As far as how long the shutter is going to be open, 1/30 would be six inches long because it's double the amount of time that 1/60 This this type of relationship is the same no matter what shutter speeds you're using. So if you look at the chart here, you can see that shutter speeds only gonna control ambient light exposure, but not the strobe exposure f stop an aperture control the strove exposure and again, back to what I just said a couple minutes ago were ignoring T TL flash. This is all manual flash or manual strobe units. So again, back to this chart, when your flash unit fires a burst of light, that light's duration is usually somewhere around 1 300 toe, 1 500 of a second. And that, of course, is depending on the make and model. So if you use 1/60 of a second on your camera and you take a picture with the strobe, that flash duration of 1 3/100 of a second is going to just be a little spike. At the very beginning of the time that the shutter opens for that 1/60 of a second, it would also be just a spike at the very beginning of 11 25th 1/30 1 15th and so on. The flash fires as soon as the shutter opens. But the shutter remains open no matter how long the shutter speed is to capture the ambient light. But the flash exposure or the stroke. When I'm saying flash or strobe, I mean the same thing is going to be constant. This proves the shutter speed cannot control the brightness of the flash because it controls on Lee the amount of time that ambient light is recorded Now. One thing I want to throw out here before I move on is different. Cameras with different shutters are going toe. Have different flash slash strobe sink speeds when you're using Strober flash in most cameras, this averages about 1 250th of a second. But in some of the cameras that are still made today, it's only 1/60 of a second. There are a couple cameras that allow 1 320th of a second, but not very many again. This is the what's called the designated Sync speed, and it's the fastest shutter speed you can use with flash or stroke. If you use a shutter speed faster than a designated sync speed, you might actually get an image that's about half black or partially black, and the rest of it they normally exposed picture, and this is because of the sync speed. So again, try to never use mawr than your designated sync speed in the studio, or even when you're using flash now to take this concept. Further, Let's take a look at these three photographs. These show how the aperture controls the flash or strobe exposure, and the shutter speed controls the ambient. But first, we're going to take a look at the ambient. Each of these photos is set at FAA, and the strobe power has been set and not changed in these three, the first image on the left is F 8.5 a second. The 2nd 1 is F eight at an eighth of a second, and the 3rd 1 is F eight at 1/30 of a second. For the most part, the stroke exposure has not changed. What the ambient light is basically being removed from the photo when you get toe 1/30 of a second, that's a to stop difference between each shutter speed. As's faras, the ambient light goes. Now you will notice the first image versus the last image that the skin tone has gotten a little bit darker, and the reason it has gotten darker is because the ambient light is being removed from her face while the strobe light stays there. So it's basically creating a more contrast. The lighting situation all we're doing here again, as I want to emphasize is we're changing the shutter speed to remove ambient light. Now your aperture or your F stop controls the amount of light that exposes your picture. Let's say, for example, you're in a dark studio, no window light, no ceiling lights on, pitch dark and you set up a strobe light and you're going to take a picture or you're gonna photograph a portrait. You set the stroke toe full power and F 11 and then you take a picture because the room is dark, the shutter speed had no effect. You still have a person against the black background, whether you set your shutter speed toe 1/60 or one second, there's no ambient light in the room for you to capture, so you still have a dark picture again, whether at 1/60 or one second. If the picture was too bright that you just took, you need to change your F stop two F 16 which cuts down the amount of light coming through the lens by half. If the picture is too dark, you would open up your F stop to F eight to brighten up the subject, but again, because it's a dark room, the shutter speeds not really having any control over the subject. Now let's go to the three pictures again, where we're changing the aperture instead of shutter speed, which affected only the ambient on the left. We have a shutter speed of 1/4 of a second with the aperture of F A, and it's a pretty normal looking exposure. The next image is 1/2 a second at F 11 So basically what we've done is we've reduced the amount of strobe light coming through the lens, and then the third image is F 16 at one second. So each of these three different exposure combinations are really what we could consider to be the same exposure, but just different combinations. So F 16 has reduced the amount of strobe light coming through the aperture toe like the subject by minus two stops, but we increase the shutter speed two stops to maintain the same ambient exposure. So in each case, the flash exposure got week while the Ambien exposure stayed the same. But there's one more thing here to take a look at on the final and third image notice how the color is changing in the background. And this is the result of giving Mawr exposure to the ambient light, which was not daylight balanced like the strobe, and thus it's creating what we call a color shift. So clearly the best photograph is the first image where the strobe exposure is dominant and there's just enough AM in exposure to kind of tell the story of the office here. So now you might be wondering again, Why is this important? Well, let's say you have a home studio, the living room of your house, and you got lots of window lights and you got living room lamps and you got ceiling light fixtures and so on. If you use a long shutter speed, all of those lighting situations, all of those ambient light sources, are going to be contributing to your picture. And generally, when you're doing studio portrait photography, you don't want that you want to control all the light from the strobe units that you're setting up. And so it's important to understand that you can block out all those ambient light sources by just simply using the fastest possible shutter speed you can, which is probably going to be about 1 250th of a second. Okay, so here's a couple shots just to give you an idea. This was taken in the studio rather than in a home, but the concepts the same. The ambient light is the modeling lights on the strope, and you can have the same issues, whether it's modeling lights, window light lamps, ceiling lights, etcetera. If you look at this first picture, I chose a shutter speed of one second and noticed that first of all, she's blurry but also noticed that there's light showing up everywhere, and this is from the modeling lights. One second shutter speed allowed the modeling lights to contribute to the overall lighting scheme for her. But of course, that's not what I wanted. So I changed my shutter speed toe 1 125th And it is not enough time to allow the ambient light to contribute to the exposure, and subsequently all the ambient light is blocked out. And that, of course, is the goal. Okay, that's it for shutter speeds and apertures and how they work with strobe lights. So let's move on to the next video 5. 2 1 Introduction to Lighting Equipment Pt 1: Now we're gonna take a look at lighting equipment. You may already have lights and all the accessories and have a very good understanding of how all they work. And if you do, you're welcome to move on. But I think it's also worth listening to a little bit here about how lights work and why you would choose certain light accessories like umbrellas and strobes and so one. But we're going to start right now with the fundamentals of lighting equipment. As you know, if you've already been researching lighting or you already have some, there is a vast array of different types of lights and accessories that can be used to meet all your lighting needs. Many of the light modifiers each create a different quality of light and can create specific lighting effects. So in this lesson, we're going to cover the basic equipment needed for portrait photography and what type of light each type of modifier produces. Reflectors. Your light is most likely going to come within a seven inch silver umbrella style reflector , but of course it depends on who you're buying your lights from. One thing to note, the size and the surface quality of a reflector determines not only how far the light will spread, but the quality of light. For example, this seven inch reflector seen here on the left has around an 80 degree spread, and it produces very contrast the light. It's not really meant to be used by itself. It's meant to be used with an umbrella. The same company makes this beauty dish seen on the right. It's 22 inches across, and it has a much broader spread, a light. And because it's larger, it's going to have a softer quality of light. Which is why is called a beauty dish very popular when shooting beauty style portrait. Let's take a look at the difference between the two. The left photo here is photographed with the seven inch umbrella reflector, but with no umbrella, just the reflector by itself. Notice how contrast you the shadows are now. The second image on the right is using that 22 inch beauty dish, and there's a significant improvement in the quality of the shadows or the quality of light . It's less contrast e and softer edged shadows and really it. It's an improvement, and it's why this type of a beauty dish or other types of beauty dishes air so popular there's somewhat contrast either somewhat soft, and that's why people like using them. Umbrellas are probably the most widely used lighting accessory, and they really have quite a few different uses. They come in a variety of reflective surfaces, which is the inside of the umbrella, and it includes soft white war soft silver metallic. You can get pure silver, you can get gold, you can get half and half. There's really quite a selection. But I'll tell you right off the bat, my favorite is white and the soft silver white metallic. I don't like a lot of contrast coming out of mine devices when I'm shooting Portrait's. I prefer softer light, and I think it works pretty well. But it really again, it depends on the subject, and it depends on the purpose of the photo. But if you want recommendations, I say, start with soft white umbrellas and use those in most cases until you learn where you can practice with a silver umbrella to see what type of light quality you're going to get out of that. But I find I rarely if ever have a client wanting me to do a portrait with a silver umbrella. Due to the contrast, I already mentioned this theory previously. But the size of the light source determines how soft the quality of light is in relationship to the size of the subject, meaning If you use a tiny little umbrella when you're photographing and elefant, then you're going tohave. Contrast the light, but if you use a really large umbrella and you're photographing a mouse, you're going to have a very soft quality of light. So keep that in mind that size relationship versus the size of the subject. So umbrellas coming a whole different a variety of sizes as well, and this again is just a Zim porton. When deciding what to use for your subject here, you can see three different sizes. We have a huge umbrella, which is going to cast a lot of light over a bigger area than the smaller umbrellas, and then the lower left umbrella is white on the inside with a black surface. This keeps light from going through it. Where on the lower right we have a white umbrella without the black backing, and this is considered a shoot through umbrellas. It works kind of like a soft box, and some photographers love working this way, and it creates a nice quality of life. Now let's take another look at these products. This is a soft white umbrella fairly close to the subject, and look how soft the shadows are and how low the contrast is. If you can recall back to the Silver Reflector image and how contrast he that was. So this right here is a perfect example of why umbrellas air really nice. Then we have light boxes, these air also extremely useful. They come in very small sizes to very large sizes, and it's the same concept as umbrellas. The larger the light source in relationship to the subject will determine the softness or the harshness of the light that comes out of it. Here we have an extra large lightbox in the background here, which is almost as tall as I am. Then there's a large light box in the upper left, a medium light box in the lower left and a strip light over on the right side, which is a very narrow light box, and it has a lot of uses light boxes air, also called soft boxes, and I may find myself using both terms in these lectures. So if you hear soft box or lightbox, just know that the same thing. The advantage of a light boxes it still produces a soft quality of light. But because it has edges, these edges are sort of abrupt, and they sort of cancel the light from spreading too far out to the side, unlike an umbrella, which sort of throws light everywhere. The other thing I want to mention real quickly is keep in mind that different manufacturers make different sized light boxes, but they call him the same name. What I'm really saying is that a large lightbox by one manufacturers might be smaller or bigger than a large lightbox from another manufacturer. Okay, let's move on to the next video. 6. 2 2 Introduction to Lighting Equipment Pt 2: I will also mention hot lights. In the last bunch of years, we've also had what's called cold lights coming up. Hot lights are usually tungsten, balanced lights and these air used mostly in video. It's a constant light source. It's not a stroke. Cold lights are fluorescent lights, and these have been really coming out in droves over the last bunch of years. And these are not hot lights. They're cold lights because they're fluorescent tubes. Hot lights actually get very hot temperature wise when you're using them. Cold lights don't do that. There are some photographers who prefer to use thes when they're doing portrait photography , but they have their drawbacks. The reason is hot lights and cold lights are constant lights. That makes them the same as the sun. That makes him the same as the lights in the living room, the same as the indoor manufacturing plant lights and so on. And as a result, you control their exposure or their brightness with the F stop, but also with the shutter speed. And if you'll remember back, that's different. Van strobe lights. You can use a fast shutter speed toe block out all the ambient light and still have your strobe create a good exposure. But when you're using hot lights or cold lights, then they are no different than all the other ambient or constant light sources in your seen this concretely it a lot of problems when you're lighting a portrait. I mentioned the living room If you got big, bright windows letting light come in when you're using strobes, you could use a fast shutter speed to block those out. But when you're using constant lights and you want to block out the window light by going to a faster shares, be your also blocking out the constant or the hot light cold light. So there's kind of the disadvantage to using those in portrait photography a little bit more on equipment. Here. I love pelican cases, the big ones where I can pack all my lights in it, as well as the reflectors, the cords in the extra tubes, these air not cheap cases, but they're very heavy duty. And at times during my career, I have done extensive travel through the airline's, and these protected my lights so I can recommend those now one of the things you might be asking yourself when you're getting ready to do a portrait is which light accessories should I use? Well, the main thing to remember with lighting is you need to use a light modifier that will create the quality of light you need for that specific subject. So ask yourself. Do I need hard light or soft light? Do I need high contrast, light or no contrast, like in my photographing something that's gonna need a big highlight or a small highlight? Do I need a focus? Light or abroad? Light. So some things to think about our that umbrellas spread the light far and wide, and this is a factor. Or it might be a factor when you're lighting a specific subject. If you don't want the light to hit, say the background right behind your subject, then you're not gonna want to use an umbrella. You're gonna want to use a light box instead because you can swivel that away from the background and keep the light on Lee on your subject. But keep it off the background. In almost all portrait's, you're going to have a background. If you're in the studio shooting a formal studio portrait, you're most likely going toe have background that you have purchased and then set up to use behind your subject. You might also be shooting Portrait's on location again, I mentioned the president of the bank with the bank in the background. Well, that creates a whole different set of challenges for you to dio and your background there is going to be lit with the ambient light, but for now, we're going to stick with studio portrait concept. If you're looking for backgrounds, there are so many places to get him from a company called Danny Manufacturing to the major camera stores like B, NH and Adirama or even eBay has a lot of really low cost backgrounds that you can buy to set up and use behind your subjects in a formal studio portrait set up. And it's a cost effective approach when you set up your background. If you're just doing a head and shoulders portrait, you want your background to just basically touch the floor. If you're doing a full length portrait with the subject standing on the background, you need to make sure that you've got a background butts long enough to not only go up behind them and above their head, but also come way out in front of their feet so that you don't see any floor and you don't see any wall. You just see them standing on a background. And since all people are different than you're really gonna want to be careful or make sure that you have the appropriate background for your specific subject. I also by a lot of seamless paper backgrounds, because I can cut off the paper that people have stepped on and left footprints and throw it away after each portrait session. Once I hang this seamless behind the person and roll it out, I usually just duct tape it to the floor so it doesn't move or doesn't curl up. And then I let the person stand on it while I take their portrait. So it's now time to move to the next video 7. 2 2 IIntroduction to Lighting Equipment Pt 3 : I will also mention hot lights. In the last bunch of years, we've also had what's called cold lights coming up. Hot lights are usually tungsten, balanced lights and these air used mostly in video. It's a constant light source. It's not a stroke. Cold lights are fluorescent lights, and these have been really coming out in droves over the last bunch of years. And these are not hot lights. They're cold lights because they're fluorescent tubes. Hot lights actually get very hot temperature wise when you're using them. Cold lights don't do that. There are some photographers who prefer to use thes when they're doing portrait photography , but they have their drawbacks. The reason is hot lights and cold lights are constant lights. That makes them the same as the sun. That makes him the same as the lights in the living room, the same as the indoor manufacturing plant lights and so on. And as a result, you control their exposure or their brightness with the F stop, but also with the shutter speed. And if you'll remember back, that's different. Van strobe lights. You can use a fast shutter speed toe block out all the ambient light and still have your strobe create a good exposure. But when you're using hot lights or cold lights, then they are no different than all the other ambient or constant light sources in your seen this concretely it a lot of problems when you're lighting a portrait. I mentioned the living room If you got big, bright windows letting light come in when you're using strobes, you could use a fast shutter speed to block those out. But when you're using constant lights and you want to block out the window light by going to a faster shares, be your also blocking out the constant or the hot light cold light. So there's kind of the disadvantage to using those in portrait photography a little bit more on equipment. Here. I love pelican cases, the big ones where I can pack all my lights in it, as well as the reflectors, the cords in the extra tubes, these air not cheap cases, but they're very heavy duty. And at times during my career, I have done extensive travel through the airline's, and these protected my lights so I can recommend those now one of the things you might be asking yourself when you're getting ready to do a portrait is which light accessories should I use? Well, the main thing to remember with lighting is you need to use a light modifier that will create the quality of light you need for that specific subject. So ask yourself. Do I need hard light or soft light? Do I need high contrast, light or no contrast, like in my photographing something that's gonna need a big highlight or a small highlight? Do I need a focus? Light or abroad? Light. So some things to think about our that umbrellas spread the light far and wide, and this is a factor. Or it might be a factor when you're lighting a specific subject. If you don't want the light to hit, say the background right behind your subject, then you're not gonna want to use an umbrella. You're gonna want to use a light box instead because you can swivel that away from the background and keep the light on Lee on your subject. But keep it off the background. In almost all portrait's, you're going to have a background. If you're in the studio shooting a formal studio portrait, you're most likely going toe have background that you have purchased and then set up to use behind your subject. You might also be shooting Portrait's on location again, I mentioned the president of the bank with the bank in the background. Well, that creates a whole different set of challenges for you to dio and your background there is going to be lit with the ambient light, but for now, we're going to stick with studio portrait concept. If you're looking for backgrounds, there are so many places to get him from a company called Danny Manufacturing to the major camera stores like B, NH and Adirama or even eBay has a lot of really low cost backgrounds that you can buy to set up and use behind your subjects in a formal studio portrait set up. And it's a cost effective approach when you set up your background. If you're just doing a head and shoulders portrait, you want your background to just basically touch the floor. If you're doing a full length portrait with the subject standing on the background, you need to make sure that you've got a background butts long enough to not only go up behind them and above their head, but also come way out in front of their feet so that you don't see any floor and you don't see any wall. You just see them standing on a background. And since all people are different than you're really gonna want to be careful or make sure that you have the appropriate background for your specific subject. I also by a lot of seamless paper backgrounds, because I can cut off the paper that people have stepped on and left footprints and throw it away after each portrait session. Once I hang this seamless behind the person and roll it out, I usually just duct tape it to the floor so it doesn't move or doesn't curl up. And then I let the person stand on it while I take their portrait. So it's now time to move to the next video 8. 3 1 Understanding the Key Light and Fill Light: So the next thing we're gonna look at his key light and fill light almost all the things we light and photograph as photographers are lit with one main light and then often can have more lights that air used for a variety of purposes, like filling in the shadows or adding accent lighting. The goal, of course, is to create light that shapes our subjects. And this is usually done with one key light, which is considered the main light, and a fill light, which is considered a secondary light source. The key light being the main light loon. It's the subject and creates the highlights and the shadows somewhat like the sun. If you're using an artificial light like a strobe light, it's often placed in a position that creates that light that flatters your subject. Then you add a second light known us the fill light and its goal is to lighten the shadows or basically control the contrast created by the main light. Here's kind of an example, and we'll have a lot more of this coming up. But if you look at the image on the left, you got a lens and you got a box and notice the highlights on the front of them, but also noticed the shadows on the sides are very dark now. If you look at the image on the right, a fill light has been added, and it was basically an umbrella positioned right over the camera and set at a weaker output than the main light, mostly to come in and fill in or lightened those shadows. We're going to show much more examples of actually applying this theory to people coming right up. But one of the main things I want to mention at this point, in case you're wondering, why is this important? Well, using one light is a very nice way to photograph people. But it can also create some problems because in most cases you're going to need other light sources to tell the story you're trying to tell about this person. The cameras, an example cannot see the range of light that our eyes can. So what made look good toe? Our eyes may have too much contrast to the camera like a person lit with one light in a dark room is going to basically be a person, or maybe even a face floating against a CIA black. So this is why you're gonna want toe, understand and learn lighting and where you should apply it and how should apply it. So when it comes to key, fill lights. For the most part, you're gonna want to reduce the contrast of the lighting on the subject when you're adding a fill like 9. 4 1 Introduction to Lighting Patterns: as a photographer were asked to photograph people for many reasons. It could be a portrait for their business, where sometimes people just want a portrait of themselves. And as a portrait photographer, you will find that you're asked to photograph people in a variety of ways and settings. So it's your job to not only make them look visually attractive, but you might also find yourself photographing them to fit a conceptual idea and is an example. It could be an actor on stage posing in their role. And in situations like this, you're still going to be doing portrait lighting. Many of the types of portrait's I have been asked to photograph are considered commercial style portrait. These include executives, employees and so on. And then there's portrait photography for the public, this might be a senior portrait of someone in high school. Could be a family portrait, could be a wedding portrait or could be Children. Portrait's in a lot of ways, these air to different businesses, the business side of portraiture and the public side of portraiture. But in the end, the techniques used toe light a person, pose them and then photograph them are pretty much the same now. To break this down even more, you can have two types of portrait. You can have the one in the studio, and you can have the environmental portrait, which could be in the office could be outdoors or somewhere other than this studio. When you're photographing someone in the studio, you're going tohave a background behind the subject, and this could be a simple, seamless paper background. Or it could be a painted background on canvas that you've purchased. Or it might be a wall environmental portrait's, which are also known as location portrait, usually are taken in a location where the background gives an ambience or is relevant to the subject being in that particular spot. Some examples might be the environmental portrait of an executive in their office. Or, let's say, in their manufacturing plant, you could also be photographing an employee or a blue collar worker in the same construction site or manufacturing plant. A fisherman on the dock, a wildlife biologist in the field, celebrity on a movie, set an athlete on the field. Any and all of these are portrait's, and in the end you're going to want to photograph them so they look great. So what we're going to do now is start with what I call the basic portrait set up. So the first thing you want to understand about lighting people is the lighting angle and the shape of the light you create. From there, you take into consideration hard light or soft light, contrast the light or flat light and other like qualities. So now we're going to take a look at various lights and the lighting angles used to create great lighting on subjects. If you take a look at this diagram, you're going to see various positions of the lights, and I'm mostly talking about the ones on the right side. If you position a light at 30 degrees, you'll see here in the diagram, but it's located close to the camera. Then there's 45 degrees, which goes to the right side a little bit more, and there's 90 degrees, which is called sidelight. To achieve each of these patterns, you will move your key light back and forth until the desired lighting pattern has been selected, and you should note that not every person is going to benefit from exactly the same light position. So this is how you master lighting? You look at your subject, and then you start moving your lights around until you find the light that makes them look great. Everybody's face is different, and here is where you have the opportunity to become a master of lighting. This is the lighting clock, this kind of something. I came up with the cameras always at six o'clock, the subjects in the middle of the clock. So you'll find sometimes in these lessons here, I'm going to describe where it put a light based on the clock, for example, it put a light at nine o'clock or three o'clock or 11 o'clock or five oclock and so on. So now let's move on to the next video. 10. 4 2 Understanding Lighting Ratios: Now we're gonna take a look at lighting ratios. Lining ratios would really be an irrelevant measurement if our cameras could see what our ICI's, but as of right now, they really don't. So we first need to understand the capabilities of the median were using and find just exactly how they capture the range between shadows and highlights. When you're using a multiple light set up, you have a key light, which is also called the main light, and you have a fill light, and in some cases you might instead use a fill card or a Phil reflector. But either way, you're measuring the difference between the two light sources the key light and the fill light. And it's this measurement between the two of those that's going to give you your lighting ratio. The key light, as we know, is always brighter, and a 2 to 1 ratio usually means the key light side of the face has twice the amount of light as the fill light side of the face. This ratio really is the most commonly used for basic studio portrait. You can increase your lighting ratio by increasing the difference between the key light and the fill light. So if you have a 3 to 1 ratio, the shadow side of your subject is going to be 1.5 stops darker than the key light side of your face. And a 4 to 1 ratio would be two stops darker van a 2 to 1 ratio. So what this really means is when I say stops, you probably already know this, but every difference, but the difference between every shutter speed when you use a full shutter speed ignorant like 11 25th toe, 1/60. Let's a one stop increase in shutter speed, meaning 1/60 is twice as long as 11 25th and the same with an aperture. F 11 F eight increases the amount of light coming through the lens by one stop, and so when you're dealing with lighting ratios, it's pretty much the same. A 3 to 1 ratio has a difference of 1.5 stops between the highlight side and the shadow site , while afford a one, has two stops difference. Now you might be wondering how to establish a light ratio, and there's basically two ways you can use a light meter or, I should say, a flash meter. Or you can do it visually and honestly, I do it all visually, and I'm actually pretty convinced that by the time you practice and shoot a lot of different portraiture, you're gonna find yourself doing it visually as well. But the other way to do it is with a flash meter. Okay, so the proper way to measure ratio with a flash meter is to put the flash meter right in front of the subject's face and then trigger the key light to flash. The meter will then measure that and give you a recommended aperture on. Let's say, for example, it's F 11 if you want a 2 to 1 ratio than you want your fill light, which is over the camera to be set to the equivalent of FAA, so you then turn off the key light. Turn on the fill light and you do the same thing. You trigger the fill light and then measure it with the flash meter, and you adjust the fill light until it says F eight. Then you have basically set a 2 to 1 ratio. You would want about F 63 f seven. If you wanted a 3 to 1 ratio coming from your feel like now, the last thing I want to mention about ratios is to think about photography as a visual medium. I mean, we see our photographs, and then we take them. And so we just covered, you know, basically had to get a technically perfect ratio between your key light in your fill light and your other lights and so on. And what I think is really important when you're lighting the face is to look for the best lighting for the subject, and for one person, it might be 2 to 1, but for the next person, that might be 3 to 1. And so I wouldn't I suggest that you get too hung up on getting exactly 2 to 1 ratios and stuff like that. Work hard toe, learn how to see good ratios on people. And then, well, the good part is you can skip by in a flash meter. So with a little practice, you're gonna learn to see what looks really good. And that's of course, my recommendation. Oh, 11. 4 3 One Light and Two Light Techniques: There are so many ways to light people out there, but for now we're going to start with the technique. I really like to use a lot, and it's called the one light set up. I like working this way because it's simple, but it's not going toe work for every situation. If you have a client who wants you to use edge lights and hair lights and all kinds of stuff like that, well, that's going to require more lights and subsequently would not be considered a one light set up. But for now, we're gonna look at how to do this in 99.9% of the time, I start with a large lightbox as my key light. I prefer the lightbox because it allows me to rotate the box on the light, and I often rotated about 45 degrees. So rather than the light box, which is rectangular rather than having it vertical or totally horizontal, I go halfway in between. That way I can get the lightbox fairly close to the camera and again, depending on the subject and their position, I can sort of get my lens to go under the upper corner of the lightbox, and it works pretty well. I put it approximately 45 degree angle, but as I just mentioned, I will move it around. I will also raise it up and strive to get a Rembrandt lighting pattern. Then, as my feel light source, I use a reflector, and when I'm in the studio, it's often a large piece of foam core or when I'm on location. It's a large, light form style panel rather than a disc reflector, which I do use from time to time. It's a large panel bungee corded, PVC, and we saw that back in the equipment introduction section. I often do this type of set up when I'm doing head shots for business people because it's very simple, and it's very quick here. You can see that I'm using the foam core card clamped to a light stand as the fill light source. But as I mentioned, you can also use a panel. You can also use this set up with an umbrella or a beauty dish, or pretty much any way you prefer to light as far as using a light modifier. Another option is the shoot through umbrella. These umbrellas air so cheap right now that they're very good when you're starting out setting up your portrait lighting kit, the shooter umbrella. In fact, I think you could even get him for $20. Online basically is reversed onto the light as seen here, and then the light shoots through it and creates a nice soft quality of light like a light box. But here again, what's missing from a shoot through umbrella that you do have with a light box is that this is going to throw light everywhere. This is gonna have light. Hit your background if your subject is too close to the background. So if you're working in a small space, this might not be the best tool. If you use a light box of comparable size, you can rotate it away from the background. We call it feathering. Here's a diagram showing a simple portrait set up. I have the seamless paper background, which could also be a canvas style background hanging from the background of the person in the middle there, And I have the panel, which could be either a light panel or a foam core board or even a disc reflector and then I have the key light on the right. This diagram also happens to show that I have a light on the background hidden by the subject. Now let's look at two lights setups These air best when you find that you really need a fill light over a fill reflector. And there's a lot of reasons for that. I use a two lights set up on several occasions, with the main one being that I want a low contrast light quality, meaning a low ratio between key light and the fill area, or between highlights and shadows. I want them closer together, and sometimes when you're using a single light source with a fill reflector, you cannot get a low enough ratio between the highlights and the shadows. These examples include glamour type shots or a high key lighting situation, where you really don't want very much in the way of shadows, as I mentioned in a one light set up will use a foam core reflector, ah, light disk or a panel. But the problem in a situation like this when you decide you need a lower ratio between highlights and shadows, is that the reflector on Lee has a specific amount of bounce ability. That means if you're shadows air still too dark after using a reflector, you can't increase the power on the reflector, so to speak, to make the bounce light coming off of it brighter. So here's the perfect situation where you're going to go ahead and use two lights. One is a key light, and one is a fill light. Another situation toe. Have at least two lights is when you're shooting more than one person. The person closest to the key light is going to get more light than the person closest to the fill card. So in this case, by using a fill light over the camera, you're lighting everybody equally. This diagram here shows the two lights set up. The key light is on the right, creating the highlights and shadows on the face. The fill light is right next to the camera, which is extremely important, and its job is to mostly lighten the shadows on the subject, and how much you want to lighten them depends on the lighting ratio you hope to achieve a 2 to 1. A 3 to 1 or 4 to 1 are all achieved by how much power you output from the fill light. Here's some examples. The one on the left is a to light set up, using an umbrella over the camera to fill in the shadows created by the key light. On the right side, you can see a faint shadow under her chin. Now the image on the right is using a reflector to the left of the subject, and this acts as the fill light source. You'll notice the shadow side of the face is a little bit different. Look at her right eye, which happens to be on the Phil side of the set up, and you will see a faint dark area next to the nose that's within the eye socket. A fill reflector is challenged to fill that area in, while a fill umbrella coming from the camera is going to have the right angle. And why is this okay? Let's look at this diagram again. You can see the key lights on the right, and the fill card is on the left. That means the fill card is bringing light into the subject from the left side, and that's what's creating that shadow in the eye socket seen here in the right image. But if you place the umbrella next to the camera or whatever, your fill light sources, it's gonna fill in the side of the cheek, and it's also gonna fill in that area next to the ice sock. And this is important. This happens to be a television news anchor, and I used a to light set up on her face, as well as a hair light and a background light, which we're gonna cover shortly. But the two lights set up was very low, in contrast, which also means a very low ratio of about 1/2 a stop. So what we have here is a one toe, 1.5 ratio, meaning 1/2 a stop difference between the key light and the fill light. And this works very good for a beauty lighting approach in a traditional portrait. So let's recap here. The basic set up is to have your key light at a 45 degree angle from the camera and then either a fill card or a fill light. But since we're talking about two lights setups here, the fill light needs to be next to the camera. When you place the key light to the side of the camera and here we're going to reference it as to the right side of the camera. You're creating highlights and shadows on the face and to fill in the shadow side of the face and keep it from going too dark, you put a fill light next to the camera. The reason you position the feel like next to the camera or right above it is you don't want the fill light to be creating its own set of highlights and shadows. This is called cross lighting, and it can create problems in your portrait. There's only one sun in the sky lighting the shape across the earth. We can use flash to fill in the shadows outside. We can use Phil carts to fill in the shadows outside, but we don't really want to create two key lights when we're shaping a subject with lighting. This cross lighting is a pretty common approach for new photographers. They basically think they put one line on the left side, one line on the right side. They blast their subject well. This works for video lighting, but it doesn't really work for portrait lighting. As I mentioned, this approach is called cross Lighting. You've created two key lights, and you've created to fill lights, each of miss creating shadows and each ovens creating highlights and these conflict with each other. Let's look at this portrait here and the diagram you can see. I've got lights coming from the left and from the light you can see I've got light coming from the left and the right. But when you look at her face, you can see that each side of the face is equal in brightness, and each is creating a shadow, mostly seen around the dimples on her cheek. But look right below her lower lip. There's a shadow there as well. Look under her neck. There's a dark strike going down the middle of her neck when you light with two lights at 45 degrees, they conflict, they compete with each other, and they create these lighting problems. So once again you really need to create light that comes from one side and then use a fill light source of some type to keep the shadows from going too dark. And here's another example of the proper way to do it. This portrait here has a very well placed key light to the right side with a fill light right next to the camera. And notice how beautiful the lighting is on her got a highlight side of the face and a shadow side to the face. And the lighting contrast is very soft and subtle. And she looks fabulous. This is the goal you want to achieve. Okay, let's move on to the next video. 12. 4 5 Which Side of the Face Should You Photograph?: so you're already to set up your lights and photograph a subject. But before you do that, let's take a look at different ways of lighting the subject's face, and I'm going to start with which side of the face to put your lights. You've got your subjects sitting on this stool in your studio, and you're ready to start photographing them. But the first thing you want to decide is which side of the subject you want. The key light coming from what I mean by that is if your subjects sitting on the stool and you're standing behind the camera and they are rotated to a 45 degree angle, meaning there posed in that direction, their nose is going to be pointing to that side of the camera. Let's say for this example that their face and their chest is aimed towards the left side of the camera. So do you want to put your key light on the left side, or do you want to put your key light on the right side? You can do both, but I believe that most complimentary lighting of people faces is when their chest is facing towards the key light. Not everybody does it this way, and I'll show you some examples, but I find it works best this way. So you have your subject positioned and their fahdi is facing the key light. Then you have them rotate their head back. Then, as you turn on your key light, you look at their face. You find tune it until you have a Rembrandt pattern or a loop lighting pattern. And remember, you'll move that light further from the camera or closer to the camera, as well as higher, up or lower down to achieve the light pattern you decide to use on this person when you're doing this, if you decide that you're subject's body is going to face the key light, you're going to be photographing into the shadow side of the face. But if you decide to leave the body facing the left side of the camera with the key line on the right side of the camera, you're going to be shooting into the highlight side of the face based on the head position . And there's a difference that we're gonna look at him here. Now. If you look at this example, you'll notice that her body is facing the left side of the camera, but the key light is on the right side of the camera. And look how much highlight is on the side of her face. Now, before I move on, take a look at this picture and try to decide what you think is wrong with it. It's clearly a lighting issue. Look how big her nose is and this is the problem. With the key light being on the right side, shooting into the highlight side of her face, it made her nose look huge. So here's some solutions, and the first solution was rather than change the lighting. I had her change position, and she's now facing the other way, and we're shooting into the shadow side of her face, and it looks a lot better now. Notice that her nose pointed right at the camera. It's much lessened as faras the impact by having her change body position. But now let's look at another image where she's facing left to the camera again. And rather than have her nose pointing at the key light, we had appointed a camera, and now the key, like being on the opposite side of her of the chest or front of the body works a lot better . So my point here is that you can have your subject's body facing the key light or not. But in these examples, you're going to want to make sure that the face is pointed right at the camera. When would this be a good time to do this? Well, it might be that you want your subjects chest, area or body not facing the key light because you want that area to be darker, meaning the highlights are not gonna be on the front of the body. But that's also going to make the shoulder, which is closer to the key light, be a little bit brighter. This may work, or it may not, because remember again, everybody is a little bit different, so you can have the key light on either side of the camera, and the key light can face the front of the body or not. But it's a personal decision, and as I mentioned, I prefer this myself. So let's move on to the next video 13. 4 6 Introduction to Accent Lighting: The next thing I want to talk about is what I call accent lighting. This is basically lighting that adds little hints of light and so on in different areas of your subject. Some people call some of this approach kicker lighting and so on like that, I tend to lump it all into one particular category called Accent Lighting. Again, little bits of light added to your subject to bring out detail and so on. Now I've already talked about the hair light, but I'm gonna talk about it again, just a little tiny bit here. Adding a hair light to your subject is really a matter of taste or not, and it depends on, of course, who you're photographing. And so one if I'm photographing somebody with dark hair against a dark background. Ah, hair light is very helpful. But if I'm photographing, say, a person with blond hair against a white background, there's absolutely no reason for ah, hair light that can often be the difference between making the subject stand out or pop off the background. And so it's up to you as to whether you want to add one or not. I personally think in many situations, they make the subject look a lot better. They make the portrait look more professional, and it's a nice, subtle detail that just when mixed with all your other lighting strategies really makes for a great portrait. First of all, the hair light can be a little bit difficult to set up. I basically put mine on a lighting boom above the subject and behind them. And this basically means that you've got to keep going back, re adjusting or fine tuning position of the hair light to hit on Lee, the part of the head that you want. And so that means take a picture. Go back, turn the cranks on your boom, which, by the way, a boom that actually has adjustments. The hand cranks, too. Tilt the light up, tilt the light down till the light, left or right is a huge advantage over a non adjustable lighting boom that requires you to take the boom down every time. You could spend a lot of time trying to find to net, so I prefer to use grids. But also a snoot is very, very helpful for getting a hair light. Very fine tune into a spotlight to hit the top of the head. So here's an example we've seen in this course already. There's a beautiful little accent to the top of her head. Now you can see kind of a hot spot there for the most part. And then it's very subtle to the left and to the right of that hot spot there. Now I'm when I say hot. Usually that means blown out. This is not hot. This is a perfect hair light exposure. But again, she's dark haired against a dark background, and it really helps separate her from the background. So whether to use a hair light or not is a personal decision, and it's going to depend on your subject. I recommend that you practice really get the technique down a lot and then decide on an individual basis, whether it's appropriate for the subject you're about to photograph. The next light I use, which a lot of people call kickers, is an edge light, an edge like can be kind of like a hair light, where it adds an edge of light not only to the head but the back of the head top of the shoulders and the arms. You could set up an edge light to be either a hard edge light like this example here. If you look at the neck, it's really a harsh sort of edge there, and that's because it was created with a grid. You can also set up in edge light using a light box if you're doing, say, 1/2 body length or you could do it for this picture as well. But it works really well for half bodies and even full links. And if you're going to do a full length edge light on somebody, just make sure that you're doing it with a light source that's big enough to do it. And in this case, I often use my extra large lightbox. If I'm doing an edge light on somebody, that's going to be more full length. But again, you can use a grid for a harder edge flight, or you can use a light box for a softer edge light. In this particular example, the edge light is roughly 10 to 10 30 0 clock on the lighting clock, and basically it's pretty harsh, but I like it. It works good. It's not necessary because he's not super dark haired, and he's got a light colored shirt on, but it does help a lot. Here's another example of photographing an athlete in the studio where I used on edge light again at about 10 o'clock. Notice the nice highlight on her arm and as well as on her nose. This is really making the physique stand out, and that's what this shoot was all about. It was basically a photograph that wanted to emphasize her physique, with the concept being aerobic conditioning, and the way this was lit was the key. Light is at about four o'clock, a large white umbrella at a lower power setting, making it not the dominant light source than a light box at 10 o'clock, which is much brighter than the key light. So I guess, in a way you could call the kicker light, where the edge light at 10 o'clock more of the key light than the umbrella being more of a film. And then there was also one Mawr lightbox at about 1 30 as also a feel like to keep the back side of her from going too dark. In this example of these gentlemen at full length. There is a light box at about 10 o'clock again that is putting that highlight on the arm of the gentleman on the left, and it's adding a little detail to his shoulder, a little bit hard to see in the printed example of the photograph. But this absolutely was the type of photograph that required a edge light coming from the left side to keep their dark clothing from merging with the background. So perfect example of needing a edge light here. Now here's an excellent example of what I'm talking about. This is a studio portrait with the company products a little bit different than your traditional portraiture. But if you're a studio portrait photographer, you might get asked to photograph this type of stuff. It's just a wall in the background that's been painted dark gray so that it is dark and this is a studio. While that we paint different colors all the time and then some blinds hanging from stands with a umbrella back, Ter decreed that glow through the blinds, but look at his shoulder and the side of his head. This is a superb example of creating an edge light to keep the subject separating from the background. And again, the kicker light here or the edge light is about 10 30. Now here's an example on location, and I will admit I find myself doing edge lighting a lot more on location than I do in the studio. But here's an example of ah, an edge light Coming from about two o'clock, this was, Ah, CEO of a company photographed for Electronic Business magazine, and you can see the side of his face. The kicker is keeping that sort of nicely highlighted, but also on the shoulder in the back of his arm. Now here's an interesting portrait that I am very happy about that when I took this, the woman's got beautiful tattoos and I really wanted to emphasize those. I've got a black background behind her and you could look at the diagram. Two large light boxes, one on her face, one on the background at separate levels, and I'll zoom in here a little bit. But you can see that there's just a nice little highlight on the back of her very black hair. Creating that separation. I cannot stand dark hair merging with dark backgrounds. There has to be some separation, and this worked very well. Now here's another example. And I admit, this was very early in my career photographing in a gym, and this is a technique that you see a lot with photographing sports figures. There's two umbrellas, one on the left, at about 10 o'clock, one on the right, at about two o'clock, putting nice edges on her arms. If you look at Thea top of her arm and then the bottom of her arm, especially on the right side, and then, of course, the sides of her head. This is a very popular technique for photographing athletes or wanting to show muscles and that sort of thing. And in this case, as I mentioned, this was a little early in my career. It's a little too hot on her cheeks, and I wouldn't ever do that again today. But that means it was in the film days where we couldn't really preview our photography. But it's a good example of photographing an athlete using that type of approach, and then I got one more image here that is definitely an edge light, but a totally different one. Look at the shoulders this was photographed for an advertisement again in the studio. Look at the top of the shoulders. There's a nice, even highlight going across both sides and in this case, rather than a hair light, because I wasn't going to see the head. I've got a large lightbox above this model, and that light box is creating light that goes all the way from the left to the right, and it works very well. And then large lightbox in the front with a fill card on the right side created this particular image. Okay, I want to mention one more thing here, and it's about photographing groups of people and using the technique of feathering your light if you think about it. If you put a large light box on the left side of a group, it's gonna like the person on the left side more than the person on the right side. So there's a strategy for getting a light off to the side of the camera that will light everybody pretty evenly. You could, of course, use on camera flash, but how ugly is that? That's not portrait photography. That's flash photography. If you used to flash on the camera that everybody's getting lit equally. But again, we don't want to do that. We want to create shaped our lighting. We just want it toe light, everybody equally. So if you look at this diagram, here's what I just described. The person on the left is closer to the light than the person on the right, and they're going to be much brighter than the person on the right. Remember the inverse square law? Basically, the person on the right side, if it's double the distance from the light, is only going to get 25% of the life. So to fix this problem, there's another's one thing in particular you can dio. It's back your light up and then also move it closer to the camera. If you look at this diagram, I've back the light up so that it's really about the same distance from the person on the left and the person on the right, and that's going to make him a lot more even. And you can see that in this example here, which uses only a key light with no feel like now. Another thing to keep in mind. If you move that light further back. And that's the case of this picture here, the people, the lighting is gonna be a little contrast er based on the size of the light source versus the size of the subject. Or, as they say, in relation to the subject. So the key is to get a much larger lightbox and then move it way back. So the person on the left and the person on the right are getting the same amount of light . But that larger light source is going to create a much softer light quality. Okay, so that's a wrap on accent lighting. 14. 5 1 Creating Knockout Backgrounds: At some point you probably gonna be asked to photograph somebody against White and they're gonna want really a pure white background. This could be all kinds of different reasons from photographing a person who is going to be knocked out, placed in a brochure or an advertisement or simply somebody that just wants to have a white background behind him rather than any other color. And they want it to be pure white. Now I want to start off by saying right off the bat, you cannot get a pure white background when your subject is standing on it, or when your subjects even very close to it. The background must be lit separately, and it needs to be lit brighter than your actual subject for it to be pure white. And if you don't believe me, just give it a try or just follow these techniques. When you're gonna lie a background, you're gonna have light on the left and the right, as you can see in this diagram right here, you can use umbrellas toe like the background, or you can use raw light, and you want to be sure and you position them to be equal distance from the background, with both of them aimed sort of at the center of the background where your subjects going to be standing in front of, and you also want to make sure that they are rotated or feathered away from the subject. So none of the light coming out of those background lights is going to hit your subject. To get that pure white background, you're gonna want to set your background lights to be about 1.5 to 2 stops brighter than the key light that's hitting your subject. And the easiest way to make this determination is to use a flash meter or do it like I do it, which is visually. So let's say is an example. You've got lighting at F 11 on your subject. You're gonna want background to be about F 20 or F 22 which is pretty close to two stops brighter. That's ensures the white background. However, it should be noted that if you make the background too bright mawr than two stops brighter than the light hitting the subject, you're gonna get what's called wrap around. You're gonna have light coming back and wrapping around your subject and basically doing what's called fogging your lens. Look at these two pictures. The image on the left is a perfect white background behind the subject, but the image on the right has what we call wrap around. The light is starting to come around the subject and fog the lens, and you can kind of see it. Part of her hair's a little blue, purple and so on. And she is much brighter because that background light is really starting to like the front of her as well. And this is because the background is set to be more than two stops brighter than the subject. Here's another example where I did not need the background to be perfect, and the reason is the client went in using photo shop and cut the person out from the background and place them on a white background in their image editing and their page layout software you can see at the top here. That's the top of my seamless background and even part of the ceiling in the studio here, shooting this beauty and glamour shot. The background lights are set at two stops brighter than the subject, and then a little bit of photo shop work really brightens everything up, creating that high key look one way that can help you get that background. Just the right amount of white is to use. Your camera's hissed a gram. The white background, for example, does not need any detail in it. And our history rams usually are used to make sure that we're maintaining detail in the areas that are most important. But here we don't need to do that. We want no detail in that background, if at all possible. But again, not so bright that we get wraparound on the subject. If you look at this picture where the background is white and then look at the history Graham, you can see on the very right side some of the data is up against the wall. These show each of the different channels, but this is what you want. You want them toe hit the wall. This tells you that you're gonna have a white background or it's going to be extremely close to being one without compromising the subject. The subject is all that data that you see in the middle. The right side is that white background. So again, I'll reiterate what I've already mentioned. You do not want your subject to be so close to the background that when you light it to be two stops brighter, it starts wrapping around the subject and basically fogging them. You lose your shadows and you start getting color shifts and that sort of thing. So get your subject far enough away from the background that the light that is bouncing off the white background is not hitting your subject. Then make your background to stop brighter than the subject. So let's move on to the next video now. 15. 5 3 Photographing Full Length Portraits: next, we're going to take a quick look at full length portrait. It's these air very common when it comes to photographing portrait assignments. In these situations, you want to strive for nice lighting patterns on the subject, but now you need to consider that you have light that goes the entire length of the body of the person you're photographing. Unless, of course, you've been asked not to do that. To get a nice Rembrandt lighting pattern on a face, for example, you'll still need to place your light above their head at a roughly 45 degree angle from the camera. This now puts us in a position where the feet maybe at least twice the distance from the light, as the head is. So it's in these situations that you need a much bigger light source than, say, one small umbrella or even a large lightbox. But again, it's going to depend on the size of each of those modifiers as to whether they will cover with a light spread that hits the feet and the subject in an equal proportion. I used several different strategies when I'm in a position to shoot something like this one is to use a huge umbrella that I've had, which is 60 inches, and this works very well for covering not only groups of people but also somebody in a full length position. I also have a light box that is an extra large lightbox 54 inches by 72 inches. And that's almost Aziz, tall as a regular person and covers from head to toe quite easily. I'll place it on a light stand again at roughly that 45 degree angle, or whatever I deem is perfect. And then I raise it up to be about 18 to 24 inches off the floor. This still is a perfect amount of coverage to get light evenly spread again from head to toe. Another approach is to use one of those lighting panels that I've demonstrated, which also happens to be in the 54 to 72 inch size and works very well. If you don't have that extra large lightbox in this case, you just position a couple lights to shoot through that panel, and again, this will cover from head to toe quite nicely. Here's an example of needing to do exactly that, and I needed that toe work even more perfectly because the feet are close to the camera, so they need to be equal brightness to the face. And the way that I did that is I use that extra large lightbox, and I raised it about 18 inches off the floor, and it's approximately 45 degrees from the camera because the light boxes so big I was able to pretty well cover both these guys from head to tell. This is not quite full length, but it's very close, and here I can use my extra large or 60 inch umbrella and get a lot of coverage. I not only want light hitting the library books in the background, but I want light putting a great light pattern on him for this woman who I shot here at 3/4 as well as a full length portrait, I used what's called a V panel, two large panels and again, these congee, the light panels I've been talking about, or they can be full length four by eight foot pieces of foam core that air then taped in the middle. And when these standing on their end, the shape of E. This is very popular approach for shooting clothing catalogs and that type of photography where you want good, soft yet directional light on your subjects. Here's the final portrait. Full length. The lighting brightness is equal from head to toe. When using the V panel set up and again, you can use large pieces of foam. Core people have actually taken plywood and put a hinge in the middle where the V is formed and then painted white and stand those up and they work. Justus well. It's a great technique for creating even lighting from floor to the top of their head. In other examples, I've had clients ask me toe, have the people I'm photographing, talking to the camera in some oven animated way. This type of photography is often used in newsletters for companies and stuff like that, and it's a little bit challenging not so much for me, but it is for the people, because here they're starting to be actors, acting in a way that basically has them talking to the person looking at the photograph, and it's a little bit of a challenging thing for them to do here. The lighting set up is the same. I've got a large light box on the right side, and I've got two lights on the background, illuminating it to be white. And then I just asked them to somewhat laugh and talk and move their hands around animate that sort of thing, and it usually works pretty well, but it does take a little bit of time to get a good variety of setups. So in those pictures you just saw, here's the lighting diagram. Two light sources on the background and again, these could be light boxes, umbrellas or even raw flash and then a key light at 45 degrees, with a light panel filling in the shadow side of them. So there you go. That's just a quick look at full length portrait as well as animating your subjects. Let's move on to the next video. 16. 5 4 Light the Background: What we're gonna do right now is take a look at lighting backgrounds, these air so crucial to the success of your portrait. So we're gonna look at a few different techniques on how to light them in various ways to really support your subject and make your subjects stand out in the studio. We really have a lot of control over our backgrounds in how they look as far as how bright they are, how dark they are, where the light come from, which areas of the background or lit, which or not and so on. So if you look at this first portrait here, we have some nice lighting on her face. This is one light at this particular time, but again, the hair on the side of her face is pretty dark, and most of this is due to the dark background. Dark backgrounds are pretty popular, especially like with my students in my online courses. They really like to use black backgrounds. But what's so important is making sure that hair, like she has here, doesn't merge with the background, and you end up with a face basically floating in space. I myself find I don't really photograph people against black backgrounds Very often. I've been asked to do it a few times, and that's not a problem. But it does create some challenges that are sometimes hard to overcome. One of the first of those is if you're going to create a black background and you want to add light, tow it tow, not make it quite so dark. So in a case like this image here, the head stands out a little bit from the background. I don't recommend that you go buy a roll of black paper or hang a black sheet up. Instead, get a dark grey background and then don't put any light on it. Or add a little bit of light to make it dark grey instead of black. That's the first approach to black backgrounds, especially if you're going to need some separation there. The other approach to black backgrounds is to add light to the subject. We've already talked about EJ lights and hair lights and so on, and that's a perfect way to sort of light the subject from behind against black and not have any problems with separation. Now, in this case, we have a fully lit portrait with the key and fill light of hair light and a background light. And it so happens that this photograph is the same set up as the previous photograph with the black background. Except we've added light to the background to keep it from going black. She's now separated from the background quite nicely, so this now is a perfect example of taking control, your lighting and, in particular, the lighting of your background. She's not a face floating against black, and the background does not compete with her. It supports her. She stands out from the background quite nicely. Now here are two of the backgrounds I use the most on the left is this textured model background that I use a lot are that I've shown a lot in this course so far. It's got dark patches and light patches and so on, and it's been very popular with my clients. I used these to mostly for business portrait, and on the right is a seamless paper. Ah, that's actually a very middle gray, and I've got it lit from the bottom with a background light. So it's a light tone, graduating through gray tones to a very dark gray, and this works very well. As as well. Here's another example of a blue background, which I'm photographing myself in front of when I was creating a course on Flash and using that as a background behind me, this in the studio would be lit much more effectively with dark areas on light areas to show some of the texture and that sort of thing. But this blue background was purchased for a client, so it, well, it matched their corporate colors, which is why they wanted it. I love the background, but it's not very popular with my clients. They really prefer to stand out against neutral colors. But in the end, my clients, especially in the corporate and business world, always picked this background, preferably because of its neutral tones. Now here's a background I absolutely love, and it is naturally lighter in the middle and darker, and the outside edges it comes that way. I think it's perfect for young adults like this lady as well as high school seniors in that sort of thing. But I've never really had any business. People asked me to use this background, and I often present my options to them and let them decide which background they like the best, and I always show them with people in front of them as well, so they can kind of get an idea how that background fits around the particular subject. Now here's the next thing I do with my backgrounds. This is a business man in front of that modeled gray background and noticed that the background is out of focus. I think this is another factor in creating great portrait's and making sure your background doesn't compete with him. We don't like the look of out of focus stuff, so even with this background being out of focus, it forces us to look more at the person in the portrait. So what I do is I try to keep the subject at least 6 to 8 feet away from the background. I shoot at about 80 to 100 millimeters on my lens and I use F 11 and I focus on the eyes and this almost always makes the background go out of focus and it creates a great look just like this. But again, it's that distance of the subject from the background, which has been mentioned in his courses. Well, I try to keep them as far away from the background as I can possibly get them in order to get a good background effect. And in this case again, 68 feet, even 10 feet would be wonderful. Now here is the seamless paper background in a businessman in front of it and notice. First of all, that there's no texture in the background that you have to worry about being out of focus, and so that's really important as well. I will go on location to clients, offices and set up in a conference room or something like that at their request, and I don't have much room as I have in the studio. So I prefer this approach because I can get the person a lot closer to the background and still light it effectively and not have to worry about the background being in focus at all . Now let's talk about lighting the backgrounds. Here's that same background that that previous gentleman was photographed in front of, and you'll notice that you can see the top of my light at the very bottom of the frame here and what I do is I set the light with a raw reflector on it, or silver reflector on a floor stand and put it anywhere from about 15 to 30 inches above the floor. And this is all based on how tall the subject ISS and I just do a bunch of testing until I get the great Asian just right. You're gonna have the head towards the top of the picture and the shoulders about mid to 2/3 up in the picture and idea is to create that nice glow right above the shoulders. As you can see, right here in this same photograph of that businessman, the strategy here is to get a nice gradation that comes above the shoulders. Not an abrupt line where light meets dark but rather smooth gradation of gray tones progressing from light at the lower areas too dark at the upper areas. And so this is going to take some experimentation not only with the height, but also with the distance that the light is from the background and how bright you have it . So that's gonna take a little bit of strategy, and I always recommend that you practice this and make note like your light is, Ah, 24 inches above the floor and three feet from the background, pointed straight at the background. Gives you perfect radiation. Then you know, when you go to do this, you can set it up quickly and not have to do a lot of experimenting. Now. Another thing. I'll point out here with this portrait real quick is noticed. The hair is very close to merging with the background, so this is a perfect candidate for a hair light. Okay, here's the diagram showing the light hitting the background as well as the guy in position and the key light and the fill cart and so on. Now we're back to this businessman and noticed the background. Here. It is not lit from below and graduating up. It's lit from the left and graduating from the right. Now, the number one thing about this background strategy is noticed. The key light is on the right side, lighting his face, so the right side of his face in the picture, from our perspective, is brighter, while the left side of his face and head is darker. So the key here is for the background to be darker behind the lighter side of his face and lighter against the darker side of his face. And so that's the strategy here. Now this strategy, in this case is to use a light box as your background light rather than a strobe with a raw reflector. And the reason is, we want a bigger light source lighting the background rather than creating a circle glow. Like the previous example with the seamless paper, we want the whole left side of the background to be illuminated and slowly graduated, crossed to the darker side. And so you need a bigger light source to do that. And that's why has shown here in the lighting diagram is why we have a light box aimed at the background to create that great Asian. Now, here's another example of using this exact same lighting approach to the background. But this time I'm doing it was seamless paper. Behind her is a blue background, and the light is coming from the left and slowly graduating a crossed. It's not very abrupt here like it is when I put the light behind the subject and create that glow above their shoulders. Here it's very, very subtle. But again, you can create as much gradation range in other words, how bright the left side is and how dark the right side is by increasing the power and feathering the light back and forth to create either a stronger great Asian from left to right or a weaker gradation from left to right. And I would call this pretty weak. Now, here we have 1/2 portrait on the woman is in front of a different type of a background and again using exactly the same approach. The highlight side of her face is against the darker side of the background, and the shadow side of her face is against the lighter side of the background. And the technique again, is to put that light box back there, move it back and forth until you get just the right amount of great Asian. Now here's another background for a horizontal portrait, and this is a test shot. This is one of the photos I take when I'm fine tuning all the lighting, and there's problems with the background. First of all, it's to in focus and that large wrinkle on the right side and creating a shadow doesn't really work, so we need to go in and smooth it out. And I did that. And then I basically switched to vertical photographs and that area where the wrinkle waas is basically out of the picture now. Now here's the same set up where we turned off the background light just to see if any of the key light was hitting the background and going to be satisfactory. But of course it's not. It's too dark. There's too much contrast here. And so the goal is to basically find a happy medium between the previous image, which was too bright. And this image, which is too dark. And here I went, between the two exposures for the background, one where was too bright and the previous one where it was too dark to try to find a happy medium and make it just right. And I even added a little bit in video getting to it. In some situations, you're gonna find yourself photographing people or a group of people whether the client wants him standing on the background. I was photographing this young man in the studio and basically asked him how he wanted opposed he said, Can I stand on that crate? And his mother said, No, you can't stand on the crate, but you can put your foot on it And so I basically let them do that kind of stuff. I do find the crate to be really pretty distracting, and I should have come up with something else for him. But this is what he wanted in his mom was okay with. But the reason I'm really showing this is to also be careful. When you are photographing somebody standing on a background, they're going to cast a shadow. You see the shadow right here. You basically don't want the shadow of the person you're photographing to fall behind them on the background. That's very distracting. And, you know, in my opinion, it looks pretty unprofessional. The way you make sure that doesn't happen is you get them further from the background, so the shadow falls off to the side. Here. It's pretty much falling off to the side, although I think there's a little bit of it right here. So that's number one. If you can't pull them further from the background to make the shadow upside, you have to push your key light towards the background a little bit, which is going to swing that shadow around to the left a little bit, or I should say towards the direction of the camera and out of the frame and off the background. So that's very important. Watch those shadows. Another thing to point out, that's really important. And this goes back to when I was talking about knockout backgrounds. When you have somebody standing on the background, it is, of course, virtually impossible. Toe light the background separately from the subject. The light that's hitting the subject often times is hitting the background. Now you can use cutter cards, and I showed those earlier as well where you can block some of the light from hitting the background. But it's not really that easy to get a separately lit look to your background, meaning lit with other lights that are not hitting your subject. Most of the time, the light hitting the subject is going to hit your background. Now here's an example of this businessman sitting in the chair using that tilt shift effect , and when I ended up doing as you can see, the shadow first of all on the left side of him, and what I ended up doing was going in and creating a vignette that sort of blended it all together and made that shadow not so strong. That's down on the floor now here's a cowboy in the studio foot on a bale of hay. The background is receiving the same light that's hitting him. So in this case, what I did is I take it into photo shop and a converted to black and white, and I really make him stand out as far as tonal values like his face is pretty bright as well is his hand, and then his chest comes along accordingly, as Faras, the clothing is concerned. But then I go in and I add that vignette and I dark in all the corners around him. And then that really makes the background more of a supporting part of this overall photograph, making him look really great. And I did this in processing because I couldn't do it in lighting, and then finally, I'm going to show you one more approach to a background. This happens to be the vertical blind in front of large windows, used us a background behind all these people in a business office. But this is fake. I went and bought these vertical blinds, and then I suspend a metal pole between two lights stance, and I clamped the vertical blinds to it and raise it up. And now we have a simulated office background, and I have a large light box on the left. And basically there's an umbrella aimed straight to the left that's creating that glow in the blinds, as if the sunlight is coming through and it works perfectly. In addition, you can have this way behind the people. Ah, at a good distance and your key light and feel like will not hit them as far as the blinds and won't add light to the blinds. They might be getting a little bit from the key light, but it doesn't look like a background behind somebody that you're tryingto light separately . And so this works really well. So when it comes to backgrounds like anything else in photography, your imagination is what matters. And if you have an idea for a photograph or you got a client, come and say, Well, we want to create an office look but we don't have an office for you to shoot in because we're a virtual online agency. Then you can set up and fake an office here with vertical blinds. So there you go. There's a few strategies on basically lighting backgrounds enjoy. 17. 6 1 Posing the Head: Now we're gonna take a look at different strategies for posing, and I'm going to start with what I call framing the head you've certainly heard by now when you were learning photography about the rule of thirds, and you could look a portrait photography as one place you can apply the rule of thirds for traditional portrait's headshots. In particular, you're framing will be vertical rarely D a photograph a head shot horizontally for these types of portrait, you really just need to look at the two horizontal lines in your rule of thirds and place the eyes on the top horizontal line and then position the head somewhat equally between the two vertical lines that create the third's. This is considered a very basic portrait and is not always considered to be very creative. But there are plenty of other opportunities to shoot Fortress where you can get very creative. If you look at this image, you can see where her eyes are on the top line and her chins on the bottom line. And basically, if you were to add the two vertical lines, the heads pretty much centered in between those. Another thing to think about is what we call the X crop. If you look at this portrait, the X has been applied with two diagonal lines coming from each corner down to the opposite corner. Here, you want to put your nose close to the center, but also on a diagonal line. This puts the near side I closest to the camera on the upper section, but here I'm getting a little bit technical. But it's a strategy you won't really be drawn. This X on your camera, LCD or anything like that. You will be consciously just trying to center the person very effectively in the frame. Another post. It's very popular and shows a lot of strength. And people, no matter whether their women or men, is when their arm is leaning on a table in the studio that could be opposing table or anything else. You can get close enough to them, where they only have to lean towards the camera just slightly. This kind of illustrates a person's strengths that they're strong. They're leaning towards the camera and that sort of thing so you can get opposing table. You confined these online posing tables, which are just a small table on a stand that can be adjusted to go up or down, depending on the size of your person, and then they just sort of put their arm out on it and lean towards it just a little bit. You don't want to do too much because a little goes a long ways. Another thing I do when I'm photographing a portrait is put my person or subject through the motions, so to speak, and this is going to be a lot of chin up, chin down, tilt your head more, tilt your head less and so on. We do know the most important thing toe a person's face are their eyes, all of us, as human beings look at ourselves in the mirror every day, and we always look at the eyes as we do this. We often see imperfections with what we see, so it's natural to develop mannerisms to diminish or hide these perceived or riel imperfections. When we are out in the public, especially upon arrival in a studio for a portrait session, it's natural to want to hide crooked teeth along knows a double chin, a diminished hairline, and many people do this by raising their chin. Among other things, they feel are unnatural. As a photographer, you need to pay attention to your subjects and find ways to hide these imperfections by highlighting their strengths. Often it's a compromise, an attempt to make everything as perfect as possible. If you conversion allies, the face on an equal plane is the camera than all facial features appear equal. But it's the subject. Lifts or lowers search in the facial features become uneven. Raising the head makes the chin look larger while lowering, it makes the forehead look larger. If the subject raises their chin than eyes get smaller and if they lower the chin, eyes get bigger. Perfectly parallel. Makes the eyes look natural, but may leave the nose, chin or other features. Not quite right, however, this is where compromise may come in, and it's up to you. Toe. Find that magic spot. The slight lowering the chin might make the double chin show, but make the ice wonderful, and this is sometimes an acceptable tradeoff. If you're subject does have a double chin. Try raising the camera little, maybe to the height of their eyes instead of the nose height. This way, the camera's looking slightly down upon them, and it can help hide a double chin. You can also slim a rounded or chubby face by using more of a sidelight, such as a Rembrandt and a higher ratio, such as 3 to 1 for more contrast. For a slimmer face, try more of a loop lighting and a 2 to 1 ratio. If the nose is too long, the more they look straight into the camera, the more diminished this will look. Here's a Siris of business portrait's showing the evolution of a shoot I did for a local businessman, and the look I eventually wanted to achieve this image is his natural pose. When I asked him to sit down and look at the camera, I'm seeking a Rembrandt lighting pattern and a 2 to 1 ratio sort of my unusual approach. I also have a hair and an edge light coming from behind, but as you can see, there's a reflection in the glass is. So I asked him to lower his chin to remove the reflection, and you can see that here in this image it's okay for a portrait. But I really don't like his head position So I have him turned his head towards the lens more and in this image, lower the chin a little bit. And again, this is not bad. I have him turn more in this image and then pretty much point his nose straight at the camera. And again, this is OK. This final image here has him tilting his head to the right a little bit, which I like a lot. And I also turned off the hair on the edge light because I decided that I did not like it hitting his shoulder and touching his cheek. So we've gotten rid of the reflection, the chins at a perfect height. The nose is pointed straight at the camera, and out of all of these images, this one makes him look the best. Now let's move on to our next video on posing techniques. 18. 6 2 Posing the Body: we're now going to look even more in depth at posing techniques. When a client looks at a portrait of themselves and their critical of what they see, it often is more related to the position and pose and how old they might look or how chubby they might look or how skinny they might look or something like that. But usually it's not related to your portrait technique unless you failed miserably at documenting them in the best possible pose with the best possible lighting. But it's your job. Is the photographer to not only light them effectively, but to pose them so they look thinner, look more rounded, look younger, look a little older or whatever their wishes to be created in the portrait, your taken of them, these air skills you really need to develop and that ability to develop the instinct to pose people according to who they are and what they look like. As you know, there really are no rules in photography, but there are some aesthetics in creating good portrait. We all know when we see a good portrait, but we also know when we see a bad one. So in my mind There's basically two types of portrait's, and I call them traditional and freestyle. Traditional tends to follow classic opposing positions, while freestyle tends to be more liberal. Imposing traditional is often what you get when you go to a portrait studio to basically have a business portrait done a head and shoulders type style, while a freestyle available at a lot of portrait studio as well tends to be, ah, lot more free imposing and that type of thing, and you might find these in Senior Portrait's and so on. Either way, most of the techniques that work in one also work in the other style. When it comes to posing men, we often pose them in what we consider to be strong and powerful poses. While women tend to be posed a little bit more in if eminent or a softer approach to posing , however, keep in mind there should be no stereotypes for either gender. What so ever pose women in a strong position? If you're photographing a CEO or a few photographing a beauty queen, a more soft and central approach to posing the thing to remember is that the position of the hands, the feet, the head and the body language in general all support a well posed portrait. So let's start by looking at body position for head and shoulder partite Portrait's. This has already been touched on previously, but we're gonna take a closer look now in this image here. She's facing the camera straight on, and I call this the mug shot. It does not work very well for what she's doing, and especially in a traditional portrait style. You can look at many magazines as an example, men's journal outside Rolling Stone and, well, quite a few different magazines. And you can see photographers photographing portrait's of athletes and actors and so on, using this straight to the camera mug shot style approach. And they often work very well. So here again, despite what I'm emphasizing here, there really are no rules. Now, if you look at this portrait, it's the same woman straight on facing the camera. But this time I'm using a glamour style lighting, and it works quite well. I would call this more of a freestyle portrait in determining how I was gonna post her, because she's now using her hands as part of the portrait and so on, and this style of portrait works all the time. So my point here is when I'm talking traditional, I'm talking somebody sitting on a stool with their body turned at a 45 degree angle. The head rotated back to the camera had tilted a little bit for a traditional style of a classic portrait versus a freestyle post, which is much more casual and not so stiffly posed with head tilts and finger displays and that sort of thing. So I'll show you a little bit more here. So here's a professional woman, and this particular portrait on the left shows ahead post. That is straight to the camera and it works, and it's fine, and she was happy with it. But on the right, I had her tilt her head a little bit, and this begins to take on more of a professional business type portrait. And it works. Justus. Well, she chose the one on the right by the way tohave printed. Now here's three photos and again, on the left side. We have a softer look to the post. Her head is tilted towards her near shoulder and her chin is down a little bit I don't think this works that well, but it is a good example to show you what's happening. Then we change clothes. We change the background a little bit, and now she's leaning the other direction with their head tilted that way, And this one feels more casual and more warmer. And finally, the picture on the right is your classic business portrait. The body or chest is facing to the right of the camera at probably at about 40 degrees approximately, and then she's got a tiny little bit of a head tilt. And I've done a 1,000,000 of these types of portrait's for businesses when they want staff portrait's for their website or for the staff brochure or something like that. And this is what they like. Very, ah, high school grade school looking classical portrait. Here's a couple men and on the left, he straight to the camera and on the right. The head is tilted slightly. When I'm photographing people like this, I run them through the motions, as I just mentioned previously in another video head tilt to the left head tilt to the right, chin up, chin down. Rotate the head a little bit But generally, when I'm doing a portrait like these, the nose is pointed straight at the camera. In these three photos, you can see where the subject just turned almost profile in the left image. But as she turns towards the camera, this broadens or weitz her shoulders and makes the head look smaller. In the third image on the right, she's turned it a 3/4 view. I feel that the middle image and the right image work a lot better for her body shape, because she is, ah, pretty thin person. But if you have a large person, keep in mind that you can make them look a little bit more slender by having them turn their body a little bit more profile, like the first image here seen on left. Now, I already covered. This is well in a previous video, but I'm gonna talk about it again a little bit in this particular image here. The key light is on the right side, so it's not hitting the front of her, and I think it works very well. I talked about this from the standpoint that when the body faces the key light, you get good lighting on the front of a person, and often that works best when you're doing a business head and shoulder type portrait. But when you're doing other types of portrait's, when you can get away from the formalities, having the body face away from the key light can work here. Most of the light is on her face, making it brighter, and this works very well. Another way that this lighting approaches used quite a bit is in boudoir and glamour photography, where they want to emphasize the chest of the woman and in particular, the cleavage area, where the lighting angle creates more shadows and highlights and definition. So that's another reason for having the body face this way, if you're doing that type of portraiture arm position and how it relates to the rest of the body is also an important consideration in this photo. You can see how our arm is in this post up close and next door body, and it can. It creates an uncomfortable look in this photo. The arm has been moved and creates a line leading to her body, and it feels much more balanced. Now let's move on to the next video 19. 6 3 Posing Hands and Arms: depending on the style of portrait you're doing. Hands may also require some special attention. The main rule is to avoid showing the back of the hand and avoid pointing at the camera. Rather, you want to position them to show them a simple limes supporting the rest of the composition. Here's three photos that show you a variety of posing, of the hands in the left image, the hand and the fingers. Aaron. A nervous post or unopposed that indicates she doesn't know what to do with their hands in the middle image. The hands air apart, and it almost appears as if she's pushing the chair to the table. But there's no table there. And, of course, that's not what she's doing in the right image, which is also a poor example. Opposing hands, she's gripping her arm. Nothing here looks comfortable or relaxed in all three of these, so here we have two more examples that are more relaxed. We've changed the body position, but we're also changing the hands a little bit. The left image has the fingers lying across the hand, and it looks pretty good, but they're not perfect. As you can see, the back of their hands. So what I had her do was dropped her wrist, and that would be her left wrist. And that makes the joint of her wrist hidden behind the back of the handling on the chair. And then I had her stair step, her fingers. This creates a much more relaxed and elegant looking post, and again, this is a classic portrait posing style of hands. Now we've got some half length portrait's, and I asked her to fold her arms in this image on the left and do whatever came naturally to hurt. But as you can see, she doesn't look very relaxed. And it's not an elegant pose, but rather the hands air hidden behind the arms. So in the right image, I had her put her thumbs behind her arms but her fingers on the front of her arms. And then I began to stair step them as well to create a more formal and relaxed look. You may also be photographing people in your studio where you're going to have them seated , but yet you want to include their arms in the poses. Here, the hands and the images create nice lines and balance with the portrait nicely, but the upper hand does create somewhat of a large block on top, so pulling that arm a little closer to her and allowing the risk to bend or break as it's called would be a much nicer post. But even better is opposed more like this, where both arms air on the tables, with the hands coming up and locking into the arms again and again with the finger stair stepped. Sometimes in classic portraiture, you're gonna want to bring a hand toe a face. This creates a leading line that draws the eye to the person's face. But here the palm of the hand rests on her cheek, and it just looks like she's bored trying to keep her head propped up from falling asleep. And it just simply doesn't work. This is a classic portrait, and honestly, I did this very early in my career a long time ago, but I would never do it again. But the chin is resting on the two hands against her cheek. Now you can still do something like this and make it work, but you don't want it to quite be so static. Get a little closer. Focus on the hands and the face and mix it up a little bit. And then you would have a nice post that works very well for a freestyle approach to this type of oppose. What I did is I began to move things around a little bit, have her mover fingers, have her lower her hand, try a couple different things, and this worked a little bit, but not that great. Then I moved on to doing something where I brought the fingers in together in more of a grip, and I felt this worked a lot better. It reduced the size of the hands in relationship to the face, and I think this worked a lot better. And finally, another thing you can dio is eliminate one hand and put the other hand up under the chin as if the chins resting on the hand or something like that. In this particular case, it still needs some fine tuning. The wrist is sort of aimed towards the camera, and we don't really want that. So what I did is I had a rotate and then put her finger under her chin and this looks much , much better. So again, what you need to do is keep trying a few different things and see what works. Because not every person's the same. And what works for 1 may not work for another. So here's a couple that I photographed in my studio, and basically the hands was a challenge. So he's got his hands on her waist and she's got her hands kind of on top of one of his hands, and this works pretty darn well. Here's another example of an executive who requested a stronger posed on what I was originally doing for him. So we got him leaning in a chair. There was no tables in this room because I was photographing at the company headquarters. And so what we did is we positioned him to lean on the chair, and that brought him forward towards the camera and created a very nice, strong post. And he was quite happy with this. We're back to this woman, but this time she's in a business suit. So we tried a couple different things. She as well, is leaning on something in front of her, and it happens to be a table here. This leaning towards the camera creates a atmosphere of strength and works very, very well, especially for business women. And then when we had her in the half post, she also put her hand on her arm like this, tucked in the thumb, and then stair stepped her fingers. But this time we left her other hand hidden. So there you go on posing. So let's move on to the next video. 20. 7 1 Beauty and Glamour Lighting: the next lighting technique we're going to take a look at is beauty and glamour lighting. There's lots of uses for this type of photography, not only from photographing business people or especially business women in somewhat glamorous type lighting or much more appealing style of lighting for a woman or cosmetic ads, fashion spreads for magazines and so on. So I'm gonna show you a couple ways that you can create really a soft quality of light. You can then have some examples to go, experiment and really define your own style. Generally, beauty lighting is used on women and its techniques that usually define or show the skin tones as being pretty flawless. So it's fairly low. In contrast, a lot of this technique is done with not only flat or low contrast lighting, but also makeup has a lot to do with the beauty approach to lighting. Some photographers will use pretty contrast delight, while others will choose a much softer like quality. And it really depends on what you want to do yourself. The ratio between highlights and shadows isas Muchas 2 to 1, but a lot of times it's even down to a 1.5 to 1 so very low contrast type lighting. So your approach to beauty lighting is going to depend on the particular light modifier you choose to use. And there's a whole bunch of different approaches here that all work and create different qualities of light. This example is a beauty dish on one of my white lightning. It's 22 inches and it's white on the inside, and it creates kind of a moderately contrast. He like quality. You can place this right over your camera for a very straight on look, but generally people raise him up a little bit and go for the butterfly lighting pattern. Here's another example of a shoot through umbrella, but what I really want you to take a look at is the white card she's holding under her face . This is the fill light, so to speak, and this technique is roughly close to what they call over under technique, which in the last bunch of years has become clamshell lighting. You can have a shoot through umbrella as seen here above creating your key light, and then you can have another shoot through umbrella below. That creates the fill light you can also use a white card like this, or you can use a disk reflector and I'll show you a couple here. But if you look at her, the lighting is probably 2 to 1, maybe even closer to 3 to 1. Using the card sitting on her lap, you would want to raise it up a little bit higher to get Mawr. Ah, Phil coming in under the chin, under the nose and so on. Okay, so here's two pictures showing a before and after I started with a Rembrandt light pattern and no Phil, and you can see on the left image here that it's really quite contrast e in the right image . I turned on a fell like next to the camera, and I set the ratio of 1.5 toe one. What I don't like is the shadow under her chin and the obvious wrinkles in her cheeks and so on. So I'm going to show you this steps I went through to get the image that I really liked. So the next step I took was to bring the key light closer to the camera and position it at about 5 30 on the lighting clock to really light the front of her face. More fully, I still think the wrinkle next to the cheek is a little bit too strong. So by turning her face to the right a little bit, the shadow is reduced a little bit more. Here's the final photo. I went for the butterfly lighting pattern, and then I brought in a silver reflector on a reflector stand, and it's positioned just under her chest area so the camera can't see it. But a lot of that light is bouncing up under the chin and under the nose. Now here's another approach to clamshell lighting, and if you look at the eyes, you can barely see the catch lights from a light box above and a light box below. Here's a diagram that kind of gives you an idea of the clamshell lining approach with two light boxes. The lightbox above is 1/2 a stop higher in power than the light box below, and it creates kind of a key Phil approach. But what's also really nice if you look at the cheeks, they're starting to go into shadow a little bit, and this is really beautiful light quality. You can do this with light boxes, and again, you can do this with shoot through umbrellas, one below and one above. So here's another approach, using pretty much the clamshell over under approach. But using a reflector again, I've got a silver white umbrella above not a shoot through this time above the camera, creating almost a butterfly style pattern but because her heads tipped. It's almost looking more like a Rembrandt or a loop lighting pattern, but you can see when it's right above the camera. The shadow from the nose go straight down and makes it look kind of like a Rembrandt lighting pattern. But again, it's It's lots of highlight with minimal shadow, and it works really, really well. But what's different here than in previous examples is noticed. The Silver Reflector at the bottom of this picture, this is picking up a lot more light and bouncing it into the shadow areas, and silver reflectors will pick up much more light than that white card that was used in a previous example. So here's kind of the final image, processed in somewhat of a high key manner, just to show you how the end result really kind of looks. This diagram also shows you the over under type approach to the lighting again. You can use beauty dishes like this diagram shows. You can use light boxes you can use shoot through umbrellas and pretty much anything you want in developing your own style. Now I'm gonna show you a different approach to beauty lighting. If you look at the picture here, you can see there's great highlight on the front of her face, and then it recedes into shadow. And this is very, very nice lighting for shaping the subject's face. If you look at the diagram now, you'll see two different lights. These are small strip lights that are placed right next to the camera, and they are basically pointed straight at her. Noticed that there's no shadow under the nose. There's no shadow under the chin, but there's nice light that's bright in the center of face and graduates off to the side of the face, and the shadowing really is on each side of the notes. And so it's really quite lovely. So again, to strip lights one on each side of the camera and you can see their reflections in her eyes and then a white reflector underneath to kind of bounce light up under the chin. So again, another really nice approach to beauty lighting. Now, one of my favorite ways, toe light, is to use a Octa dome. And here's a picture of what an Octa dome looks like. My Octa dome is seven feet. That's huge. That's bigger than me. If it's touching the floor, it's still gonna be taller than I am. And this big, giant light source creates very beautiful soft lighting. Now, if you look at the model here, you can see the same thing. She looks fabulous again. The light ISS centered on her face, but it's graduating off to each side in to create shadow. But in a very, very low contrast and subtle way. It's beautiful. So here's the diagram. I put this behind the camera, and then there's a reflector underneath her to make sure that the shadows under her chin or filled in nicely. Now here is an excellent example of beauty lighting, and this is not my photograph. This comes from a former student of mine, Leanne Martin, who took this class, and she basically created this photograph, and I thought it was so fabulous. I asked her if I could show it. What she did is she is using to eclipse brand umbrellas both on camera right and one is below, and one is above it is essentially the clamshell or over under approach. The top eclipse umbrella is set at F 11 and the bottom is said at F 8.5, which I think is technically F nine F 10 somewhere in there. Then she placed a rectangular reflector under the model right in front, just a little bit above her waist. For the most part, that's bouncing in fabulous fill light to fill in the shadows and keep him from getting too dark. She also happened to use a color gel on the background light, which is a light position directly behind the model, creating that nice blue glow that's a little bit brighter right above the shoulders than at the top of the photograph. Very nice photograph. Okay, On the last examples of beauty lighting, I am again creating over under or clamshell lighting. This happens to be a Czech supermodel name Lenka, who lives in Dubai, then there several times and happened to photograph her during the Gulf Photo plus event with my workshop participants. And again, we used the over under, and I started with lights positioned at about five o'clock next to the camera and set again with 1/2 a stop difference between highlights and shadows. This is one of the first photographs, and it happens to be my absolute favorite look at her face. Nice highlight on the side of her face and beautiful shadows on the side that really show her features. It looks great. Then there was also a background light hitting that canvas background back there, Lanka was moving quite a bit into different positions, and so in some cases, I wanted to be sure and adjust my lights to keep up with her. In this picture, we turned off the background light, but I don't like it as much. It's all light on her face more than anything and again, the lining on her is good, but I think the added detail in the background works much better. Then in this example, she straight to the camera. So we moved the key and fill light literally as close to the cameras. We could and maybe even above and below the camera a little bit. So I would call this 5 45 on the lighting clock for the most part, and we also toned down the background light to be between the really bright example and then the really dark example that was just shown. She then started to move around in different positions, and this one looks pretty good. And then this one looks fabulous again. She's facing towards the key lights perfectly. And then she turned to the left of the camera and I didn't move. The lights in this case noticed now that we have what's called broad lighting, mostly highlight on her face with a little bit of shadowing. And there was no Phil Reflector here, but there certainly could have been one on the left side of the camera, maybe lightening up those shadows a little bit. But again, it's a matter of taste, so this picture is okay. But when she tilted her head back a little bit and then rotated her had a little bit more towards the camera. The lighting began toe work really good, creating that almost flat beauty lighting. But again, look at her cheeks. Absolutely fabulous. And this again has the light at about 5 45 above the camera and right below the camera in 1/2. Stop difference. So there you go. That's an introduction to different ways. You can do beauty lighting, and hopefully one of these techniques will accommodate your particular style. So we're gonna move on again. 21. 7 3 Advanced Portrait Techniques: So now we're going to take a look at some different techniques and some problems. Or so I should say, really some challenges that so my clients presented me with and how I tackled them. So this first picture here is the cover of an annual report, and you can see all these people stacked up in the portrait converted to black and white. When the client showed me the layout for this, it did sort of raise a red flag. You have this group of people standing shoulder to shoulder and then staggered a little bit so we can see all their faces. And my first concern was depth of field. Could I get them all in focus and zoom in on them and really create this stacked look of people next to each other? So we ended up setting everybody up, and the very first problem that arose was the difference in their heights. So I did bring a few things for people to stand on and someone and try to even amount. We did the best job we could for lighting. I used to large umbrellas, as you can see in the diagram here, one in the back and then one closer to the camera with a fill light off to the side. The idea for the two key lights was that the first key light wasn't going to hit everybody or starting at the far end versus the near end. So two key lights basically toe light the fronts of all of them, and then the fill light off to the side to really fill it all in. The client really wanted one photo, but while we were shooting this and the clients looking at the pictures and seeing the really difficult challenges of the different height, keeping the head sizes close to being the same because they really weren't we ended up doing this group photo. And then we ended up photographing everybody individually, and they went into photo shop and composited them all to create basically the same head size, a really nice amount of staggered positions for everybody, much easier than trying to do it all in one shot so very challenging. But that's how we handle this thing. Shoot everybody individually against a white background, using exactly the same lighting technique on every single person and then separated from the background and create the composite. Another technique that's kind of fun is a high key technique. And what that means is most of the tones in the scene are light and bright, really not very many blacks, if any, and so the high key is really ah, fun one to Dio. There's also Loki, which means all the tones are closer to being very dark. Hi Key is often pretty flat because the goal again is to avoid shadows and create contrast . Or, I should say, have less contrast when you create a high key. So here's a portrait of a woman and you've seen this already. You could call this very high key. She's blonde. She's lit with beauty lighting technique, and the background is white. So clearly Ah, high key technique. Now here's a multiple exposure of a ballet dancer. That's an excellent example of high key and freezing motion. Multiple times in the same frame here I used a white, seamless background, and she also wore a very light toned outfit. I used to large soft boxes, one above the other on the camera, right at about four o'clock and another umbrella above the camera for Phil and I set the ratio between the two at 1/2 a stop or, as they say, 1.5 to 1. I then accentuated the effect in Photoshop just to make sure the background was nice and white, and she was somewhat translucent and bright. Now, as I mentioned, Loki is just the opposite of high key, the tones air old, darker, mostly made up of medium to dark grey with some black. This portrait was actually created for a book that featured a lot of notable women in the Pacific Northwest, like writers and politicians, artists and dancers etcetera. And then I was asked to photograph two of the people that we're gonna be in the book. And so he went for this low key effect, and you can see that her face is brighter. But the light really falls off the bottom of her. And that was exactly the goal, just to be really artistic, with lighting almost black and white, that's somewhat dark in tone that has a feel of a glow to it and so on. So the first step, of course, was to create the background, and I began by painting the wall in my studio a medium grey. Then, besides the gray wall, I've bought very dark charcoal gray paint and very light paint close toe white, but still a little bit great. And I took a sponge and I dipped it into the paint tray, and I would splotch the dark patches or dark spots and white spots all over the wall to create a really nice textured background. And I use that for years photographing people in front of it. I then through a canvas on the floor and set her on a stool and for the lighting, a use in extra large lightbox on camera, right, and then also a grid on a second light that was hitting her in the face. And I'm gonna show you this technique coming up so I won't go into too much detail here cause I haven't a better example. Ah, the idea is that the grid light and the light box are both key lights, but the light box is at a weaker power than the grid and the grids aimed at her face, and then the key light sort of lights the rest of her at a much reduced power. Then I also use something called a cutter card, and this is something that a lot of photographers use, and this is a great example of how to use it. If you look at the at, the right side of the picture of the wall in the background is pretty dark. And that's because a cutter card is positioned between the lightbox and the grid and the background to create a shadow or basically cast a shadow on the wall. You take that cutter card, which is big, like, four feet by eight feet or close, and you slide it close in and you slide it back out until you find the shadow that's hitting the background perfectly. And then that sort of creates more of a glow around her, but not evenly lit on the right side. And it works a lot better. Finally, I took that finished photograph and I darkened a little bit more and add a little vignette and so on, and it worked pretty good. Now here's another kind of a low key, not quite. This is an executive of a financial investment company and what I did here instead, as I did focus Shift noticed that his feet are out of focus, but his face is sharp. You create this focus shift technique with a tilt shift lens, which changes the plane of focus. If you're not familiar with those, I recommend you go check it out online by just searching for tilt shift lenses and the effect that they can have on portrait. It's really pretty fun. So I focused on his face. But then I tilted the lens, which through the feet out of focus and the top of the background out of focus, because I'm changing the plane of focus and it works really well. Now I will say tilt shift lenses or not very cheap, and you can do this exact same technique now in Photoshop, and I would recommend that you search online for how to create a tilt shift effect in Photoshop. But there's also software plug ins for photo shop, where you just push a button and then you move from sliders and it will adjust that focus and for the most part, create that cool effect. Now for lighting here, basically a large light box on the right side, which is up at a height enough toe light his face and his chest in his hands, But it's falling off of the bottom. And so I did that on purpose. I want to defeat a little bit darker, so I'm lighting his face in the in the top of him to be pretty bright. So that the viewer, the photographs looking at him and not the bottom of the picture as much. And this doubles up the effect of being out of focus and darker. Nobody wants to look at his feet. They want to look at his face. And then, of course, there's a large reflector on the left side, a four foot by eight foot panel on the left side to keep the contrast pretty low. Here's another fund technique that you can do that's really pretty simple in most of the lighting. This was an assignment for a orthopedic clinic and concept behind the photo had to do with arthritis and how they treated and all that kind of stuff, and they wanted this photograph for an advertisement. So we set up this chair in the studio. I've got my canvas background hanging in the background. I've got a large key light on the right side, creating a Rembrandt pattern on the front of her and then a fill reflector on the left side . The background is a little bit trickier. This is what I call the Venetian blind effect. And this particular technique is created using a Norman try Light, which unfortunately, are not made anymore. Norman Lighting, which makes model lights and power packs, also made a try light, which is almost like a strobe slide projector. Whatever you put in the slot, it could be a slide of a mountain that you took when you went to Alaska. You can project that on the wall behind the subject. Well, in this case, I put in a slide that was just black and white slots and then my putting the try light against the wall. As you can see in the diagram here, it creates this streak effect coming down the background. Like I said, try lights aren't made anymore. However, there's a company that is making a similar device that allows you to create focused lighting effects on backgrounds or people or anything like that, and I don't remember the name of it, so I'm gonna look it up, but you could do the same thing on a background with this particular device. So here's the diagram. Key light on the right, Phil Reflector on the left and then the trial lights in the background. Now here's a picture of a Native American tribal elder that I photographed in Idaho and here I wanted to create a short lighting effect, sort of in the style of Edward Curtis, who was a photographer in the 18 hundreds photographing the the Native American tribes of the United States. What I did was I hung my favorite canvas background in the background for a texture, and then I placed a light box at three oclock on the lighting clock to light him from the side, and I photographed him in profile. I also allowed the key light to hit the background a little bit, which is something I usually don't do. And what it's doing is it's keeping some detail back there. There's not as much light hitting the background as there is hitting his face, and when you base your exposure on the light, hitting the face in the background is naturally going to be darker. What is cool about this is it's one light and you can see how it works, and I don't usually photographed too much with one light in a studio type set up. But I did do that here, creating what I really felt was kind of going to look like an old time look. The light's probably a little more contrast year than it was in the old days when they when Edward Curtis was doing these portrait's, but that's pretty much it. Key light on the right side aimed at his face but then turned and feathered towards the background just a little bit so that the background has enough light on it to show lots of detail but not be as bright as he is now. This is a portrait I took for a friend that I ended up putting into my stock photography part of my business, and it really went and made quite a bit of money. This is a different lighting technique Altogether. I've got a canvas background hanging in the back with hardly any light on it. There's a grid coming from the left. It's up high, and it's kind of skimming down on the background. But what I used as a key light is a frosted plastic shower curtain. If you go to the department store in the home in bath department, you'll see shower curtains that are white, but they're frosted plastic. And so I've got that on the right side, and I'm shining a light right through it onto them. So when you hang that shower curtain from a poll that is suspended between two lights dance , you have a very large light source. What's different here is that a light box and an umbrella are pretty thick compared to a thinner shower curtain. So what I also did is I added my 22 inch beauty dish reflector to my light, and I pointed that were shot that through the shower curtain onto them, and it created this quality of light, and this photographs been published many times, So I also had a fill card under the left side, just to make sure it doesn't get to contrast. E. But this is a fun technique, so I would recommend giving it a try. Another technique for lighting that's pretty popular is the ring flash. If you look at this photograph, this is a ring flash. It's kind of like an on camera flash, except the flash itself is around your lens, and it creates sort of that key fill lighting approach in one effect, if you've seen somebody against the background leaning against the background, there's a shadow running all the way around them. That's because it was done with a ring light. Well, the really good quality ring lights are pretty expensive, like 2500 bucks and so on, and I know there's cheaper ones out there. But if you want a good quality one that's going to really do a good job for you, you might want to spend the money on the more expensive ones. So I did a little experimenting, and if you look at this picture, I got my beauty dish above the lens, and I've got a fill light with just a silver reflector right below. This is that clamshell over under approach, and I thought I might be able to simulate a ring flash look. And here's the photograph right here of Santa Claus, tied up with lights and it worked pretty good, and I also ended up doing a little bit of a focus shift in the processing of this is Well, so, um, if you want to do some fun experimenting, create a ring light effect either like I've shown here. Or go ahead and buy one. You'll have a lot of fun with it.