Hi everybody welcome to another episode of Exploring Photography right here on
AdoramaTV, I'm Mark Wallace. Well in the last episode I walked you through the
workflow of working in a rental studio for the very first time and if that's
you you might freak out not knowing exactly how to set up all the lights and
get everything you need to get and so in this episode I'm going to show you some
sure fire lighting setups that work almost every single time. It doesn't
matter if you're shooting kids, elderly people, models they just work and to help me out
Belen is here. She was in our last episode she's gonna be joining us for
this episode as well. We're going to start with the lighting setup called
clamshell lighting. So let's get to it.
The very first lighting setup we're going to use is called clamshell
lighting. Now the beauty of clamshell lighting is it's very simple to setup it
works with almost any subject and you can use almost any light modifiers you
want. So we have a beauty dish in an octave box here, but this could be two
soft boxes, It could be two umbrellas, it could even be to just normal reflectors.
It just doesn't really matter that much. You can play with those to see which
effects work best for you.
We've used this because that was what was available to us today. The difference
is depending on which light modifiers you use your going to get different
catch lights and so today Belen’s catch lights are going to be two round dots. If we
had to soft boxes they’d be square etc. So really the catch lights are what change
with clamshell lighting. Now to understand why this is called clamshell lighting I'm
going to move the camera over here to the other side and you start to get the idea
of how this is set up and see that this looks sort of like a clamshell.
So this is our key light. It's illuminating Belen's face and so we get
this beautiful light and the this lower clamshell here is illuminating
underneath her chin and it's giving us a little bit of fill. You can play with
the intensity of these two different lights to get either more shadow under
the chin or less shadow it's really up to you. It's just a simple lighting setup
that allows you to do all kinds of things, you can even turn off this fill
light and leave everything set up to get something that has
a bit more dramatic shadow underneath or less shadow on the background or more
shadow etc. Two lights same position, the camera is going shoot right through
those two lights and you'll see that you get all kinds of interesting effects.
So we're going to shoot with this and play around with it and I'll show you the results.
Here's another lighting setup that is almost positive to work every single
time it's just a nice large, soft, main light. We're using an umbrella here but you
could use a large softbox if you want, you can even bounce light off the wall
it doesn't matter, you just need a large light source that's approaching
your model at about a 45 degree angle from the camera and then on the opposite
side use a nice white reflector. This is just a white panel, it's reflecting light
into the other side of the Belen's face and so we have this nice light that just sort
of surrounding our model, which means it's going to be difficult to make any
kind of mistakes.
She's got this space that she can move and work in so we can get headshots, we
can get full length shots, we can get three-quarters shots, we can do all kinds
of things right in this space and once we have it set up we can just go to town.
It works again for portraits, for headshots, for little kids, for older
people, for models, you name it this lighting setup is one of those no-fail
setups. So we are going to take a few pictures and show you how these look
Well thank you Belen, that was amazing. We had two very simple setups that
worked absolutely fine. You can do these in your home studio. You can do them in a
professional studio. You can use almost any light modifier, softboxes or
umbrellas or even walls to accomplish the effects that we shot today. Don't
forget you can see a lot more lighting setups and information about studio
lighting and metering and all that kind of stuff at the Adorama Learning Centre,
so make sure you check that out and don't forget to subscribe to AdoramaTV.
It's absolutely free and that way you don't miss a single thing. Thanks again
for joining us we'll see you again next time.