studio lighting

How to Light Portraits in Photography – Part II

This is part II of a larger article. If missed the first part, click here to read it. Lighting in Photography: Studio Lighting for Portraits This is a part where those of you who cannot afford / do not own a strobe package should pay attention. If you want to include exterior light with a homemade lighting system, you will have a massive disparity between the exterior and interior color temperatures. You’re probably intimately aware of this if you’ve tried to get your interior lighting setups to include exterior light. In a “million-dollar-a-year” studio system, you’d balance to the sun with your already perfectly temp accurate broncolor strobe system and use a specific gel to match the strobe to your metered readings of the ambient light, but usually we don’t have that luxury. So first, let’s talk about mixing source light on the cheap. If you want to mix daylight … Read more

How to Light Portraits in Photography – Part I

Lighting in Photography: Studio Lighting for Portraits After learning the basics of photography studio lighting for objects, we can apply the same rules to portrait photography. However, there is one part of the equation that changes, and that is falloff. Falloff describes how quickly the center spot of the light (or area of equal illumination) changes into the ambient illumination of the subject (light cast from the room, or other lights, etc.) Here’s how it works: we’ll look at equal camera exposures of an identical object, but change the distance of the light from the subject. You’ll see that the “falloff” is different in each image even though the exposure is the same. The way this was achieved is by changing the distance between the subject and the light while maintaining the strength of the light at the subject’s surface. This is somewhat difficult to do with your household lamp. … Read more

How to Light Objects in Photography

There are lots of ways to introduce studio lighting and it seems like every book I’ve ever read has a different way of going about it. I think that studio lighting is like telling a story, you can be a master of grammar but without a good idea, the story will be lackluster. The same goes for image making. This is where one should begin: with an idea and the desire to achieve it. Lighting in Photography: Studio Lighting for Objects For as many introductions there are to studio lighting, there are also as many types of studio lighting. If you wish to some day work as a professional, it is in your best interest to be able to light any situation from products to models, table top to cloth swatches. There are two major principles to beginning any studio project. The first is the location of the “key” light. The … Read more

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