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Knowing your needs
Available vs artificial light
Hard vs soft
Flash vs continuous
Strobe vs speedlight vs LED
Location, location, location
Killer composition
Styling
Realising your vision
It's all in the eyes
Shadows and contrast
Playing with texture
Without light, a photo simply can't exist. It's the foundation from which every photo is built.
However, understanding photography lighting is just as hard as mastering your camera, but it's often overlooked by many photographers.
No two pictures are lit in exactly the same way. Light bounces and reflects off different surfaces, creating unique contrasts and colours every subject is different.
Light reflects off of the surfaces around it including modifiers, such as umbrellas. Photo by Jason Lanier.
For portrait photography, your lighting needs to be flexible depending on your genre, subject or location.
Maybe you need different lighting for when you're shooting children or the elderly?
What if you shoot on location a lot?
There are so many questions and techniques to consider, and as both photography lighting and optics advance, there have never been more choices for photographers to help release their creative ambitions how exciting is that?!
Knowing your needs
Before anything else, you need to know what it is you're looking to create, which in turn influences your shot setup.
Use Pinterest to help spark your creativity for the desired theme of your shoot. Even just for portraits, the world of photography lighting offers so many options; it's important to know what type of light will work best for your shoot.
Available vs artificial light
The most obvious form of photography lighting is the natural light that's around you.
It's easy to use - the sun is completely free after all - and can be shaped using reflectors or diffusers, but it relies a lot on the time of the day. The optimum shooting window is Golden Hour. Which is roughly an hour after sunrise or before sunset, when the sun is at its lowest position. Shots taken at the golden hour produce a gorgeous soft light with golden tones.
Shooting outside of the Golden Hour can cause unflattering, harsh or uneven shadows unless you introduce a lot of diffusions. And when it comes to street or interior lighting it's out of your control.
Artificial light gives you the ability to take back control. You'll no longer be reliant upon certain hours of the day, or the poor quality of available lighting. Eliminating a lot of these issues, artificial light gives you the freedom to create your own light and shape it to fall exactly as you desire.
However, investing in artificial light that will combat these issues is just that; an investment.
Not all (artificial) light is created equal, and it can be a maze to work through the endless streams of photography tools that will suit your style.
Some portrait photographers use artificial photography lighting to supplement available light; blending the two together to create natural-looking, but high-quality results. You still have that extra cost of buying a light and carrying it around with you, but with advances in battery technology, there are plenty of portable lighting solutions on the market.
Having the back-up of artificial lighting is a no-brainer nowadays, why limit your potential to only shooting for two hours a day during Golden Hour, or spending hours in Photoshop correcting skin tones due to the unflattering effect of poor available light?
Hard vs soft
Now we've agreed that artificial photography lighting offers you as a photographer more versatility, you need to decide what type of artificial photography lighting will suit your style. This is more down to personal preference and the look you're going for.
The basic rule of lighting is The hardness of light is decided by the size of the light source, and how far away it is from the subject: the closer a light source is, the softer its output.
Hard light casts strong shadows on backdrops in the studio and on a model's face; working well for some styles, such as a classic noir aesthetic. Hard light is generally more powerful than softer light, with the ability to throw the light over a longer distance, making it ideal for achieving wider full-length portraits or overpowering the sun.
But with such power, comes the necessity to modify. Softboxes, diffusers and reflectors reduce light output but are necessary to produce flattering results. Which in turn adds more cost, weight and complexity to each shoot.
A classic noir shot by Peter M ller
Whilst often less powerful, soft lights are fantastic for portraits in particular, because they minimise the chance of hotspots and produce the most flattering skin tones. A soft key light casts almost indiscernible shadows on backdrops and won't emphasise texture such as wrinkles on more mature subjects, or creases in clothing.
Ultimately, you should ask yourself how you want to work the light and what your priority is. Is it viable, both financially and physically, to shoot with lots of equipment to allow you to modify a hard light? Or can you work with a slightly lower output, for the effortless ease of a soft light?
Flash vs continuous
Whilst many might associate continuous lighting with filmmaking, it's becoming increasingly popular for photography lighting as well. It simplifies the photographic process; making it more accessible to beginners and those short on time.
Continuous lighting allows you to shoot what you see', and it's really as simple as that.
You won't need to keep taking test shots to see where the flash light will fall. Instead, you can re-adjust settings until you're happy with the outcome. Often when shooting portraits, you just don't need the ext
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