We're going to bring our talent in, Elanie. She's going to sit here, and we're going to
demonstrate the five different portrait positions for lighting. Now first off, I would never
have a woman sit straight to the camera, because it's just not flattering. You want to turn
them slightly one way or the other. We're going to turn her slightly to her left. It
gives her a nice line here, and then we're going to look in. That gives us kind of our
starting point for our light. I just moved a light just a little bit around
to camera right here. As you'll see, as the light moves around to the right, the shadow
from her nose closes a loop on the shadow from her cheek. You want to get what's called
a Rembrandt, which is a small triangle on the right side of her face. That's a classic
Rembrandt light. There's no shadow fill, there's nothing to this light. This is a single light,
just showing you a single light placement for a Rembrandt light.
I'm going to move us from a Rembrandt light, we can still even see the small triangle on
her right cheek, and I'm going to move this around to a strong split light. You go way
back behind so that the light really is splitting her face. We get a strong highlight side into
a strong shadow side, that in doing so, we really get a split light that runs right down
the core or the nose line bridge of the face. This really is more of a dramatic, interesting
lighting in that you really get that highlight and shadow, depending on how much. We haven't
really filled our shadow side right now. The more you fill the shadow side, the more comfortable
you are with this light. The less you fill it, the more it's going to feel dramatic or
feel a little more like you wanted to make a statement. So there's a split light, a strong
split light. We have a light right now in pretty much the
split light position. We're going to go up to what' called a broad light. In order to
do that, I'm going to move this light back around to basically our Rembrandt position,
but now I'm going to need Elanie to turn. She's going to face away from the light. She
faces away from the light, we now are back into the Rembrandt, but the Rembrandt is away
from us. It's not on the camera side, but on the far side from the camera. We now are
looking into the broad side of her face, or the lit side of her face. That's considered
a broad light for the very reason, by the name. It's called broad, that we're looking
at the broad, lit side of the face rather than the shadow side of the face. You'll notice
a preference. Some people love this light, some people use it. I don't find this the
most flattering, although as you use people, they're going to move in and out of all of
these different types of light. If your light is in the right position, it will flow from
a Rembrandt to a broad to a split very comfortably. If the light is not in the right position,
you don't get that fluid motion between those three light setups. So there's our broad light
that we can see on her face. We've now moved our soft box more forward.
We've put it on a small boom in order that we can get the soft box up high and on an
angle, a steep angle to our subject. The reason is, this is called a butterfly or paramount
light. We want to have the light directly above the camera. In doing so, we get a nice
shadow just underneath her nose. It's called a butterfly light or a paramount light. It
really gives us a nice shadow on the cheeks, on right and left, it gives us a nice chin
shadow underneath. This is very much a beauty light for women. Now if we just take a fill
card and put it underneath, now it's just a little bit of light up into her face, it's
really going to open this up and make this very pretty light. We're going to turn the
white side up. If we just put this onto her lap, then looking right in there, we'll be
able to see that that's filled all of our shadow. As her chin goes down, you'll see
that shadow build. You don't want it really to touch her lip. You want it just to be off
of her lips so that you have a little bit of separation there. This kind of helps fill
up that chin area for underneath and fills up the shadow area under her nose. It's a
very pretty light. Also you'll get a nice light, and I'll talk about that for a second
here, to take this out. If you look in her eyes, and as we're in close, you'll see a
little square in the eyes from the soft box. If you don't get some kind of a highlight
in their eye, people don't look alive. So you really want to see a really nice kind
of small square of some sort in the eye, and this gives us just right overhead, you see
that square. So if you're looking at a picture, and you're wondering how is this lit, look
at their eyes. You'll see a round object in there for an umbrella, you'll see a square
for a soft box, you can see sometimes a soft box and the fill light if you look. Now of
course, when you get a retoucher like my wife does, they'll clean all of that stuff up and
make it what they want. You can see now that we've moved our light
around. We don't have that same steep angle right directly between the camera and above
our face. We've moved the light just slightly to camera right. In doing so, we now have
created on her face a small loop of light, a loop shadow that starts to build on her
right cheek. It's no longer centered and giving us the same shadow on both cheeks. We're now
moving to the right side, moving to that right side, and we're going to highlight one side
and shadow the other just slightly. It's really just a variation of the butterfly. You can
accomplish this on the ground. You don't have to have this boom light to do it, but it's
just you want the light a little higher than when you do a Rembrandt light. You want the
light a little higher, it's more in the same position as a butterfly light as far as height
goes. A lot of these decisions on what you do with this light depends on the individual.
She's gorgeous, it's easy to light her face. If you have people who have older faces, if
you have people who have different features that create shadows and issues, different
lights are going to be better for different individuals. It really will make a difference
on who it is you're photographing. So there's a quick look at a loop light.
I'm going just going to talk for one minute about what each of these lights are doing
right now on camera. We have a key light. Between the key light and our subject, we've
put a P22 which is meant to be a softener for that light. It's a little harsh, and we
want to just soften the light out a little bit, which causes the highlights to kind of
wrap around to the shadow area. It makes it much prettier. We've added a fill light here
in order to fill in the shadow side. We have rim light from behind that rims her hair and
gives her separation from the background. We then have a background light that is on
the background that gives us a highlight from the left side to a darker shadow on the right
side that allows us to separate her from the background. Where she is highlighted, it is
darker. Where she is darker, it's lighter. That gives us separation for our subject from
the background. So just from overhead, we can see exactly where each of these are. We
can see where each of the lights are placed, our high light, our key light, our rim light,
our background light, and our fill light. So it gives us a good sense of where this
light is. It's pretty compact, but each of the lights here are accomplishing their goal
in order to make her look good. We got some great shots of Elanie. I'm going
to help Adam take the set down now, and then we're going to some of the bicycle shots we did for Electra Bicycles.