Simple Lighting Techniques for Photographers

Lesson 1: Introduction
Published: March 2012 with Tony Corbell

Duration: 1 hour 6 minutes

About Course

Capturing great portraits is all about understanding how to manipulate the quality, quantity, and direction of light. Learn how the pros use a variety of light shaping tools to create fantastic portraits every time, and in any kind of situation.

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You know anytime you're working in the studio you've got choices of what you're going to use as tools to light your subjects, and certainly in portrait or fashion work. You've got softboxes, you've got umbrellas, you've got Octabanks, you've got all these different options of sizes shapes, and all of these different tools have a right to exist. All of them are made and designed, and manufactured for a specific reason and for a specific purpose. There's not one tool that is sort of everything to all pictures, you really do have to have a variety of light shaping tools, and in this case we're going to look at several of them. Over on the far right over there we've got our 3x4 softbox. It's a great general softbox for general photography, general portrait work fashion. It's just a really nice light source and I use it as my primary source. I've got a strip light here that is really ideally suited for ascent lighting for specifically scening diagnose washes of light washes of light across the background things like that, it's great for lighting hair, shoulders, arms, legs. The Octabank the big guy of course that's a great light source for big soft light directional light yet still soft. The umbrella, everybody has worked with umbrellas before umbrellas are great light sources, but they have a very specific look, and so like I said all of these lights have a specific use, and we're going to go through this one at a time. So we're going to begin with an umbrella light, and the first thing we'll do here this is a white lined umbrella and it works as a reflective source so light fires off, hits inside the parabola if you will, of the umbrella and kind of forces the light forward, and it's a great source, but it's really good for one thing, and that's lighting a large area. If you've got alot of people to photograph like a large group shot, an umbrella is your ideal choice. If you want to try doing a nice fashion shoot with one light up high, kind of have a nice gradation of light on umbrella is a good choice. So we're going to try that and we'll see how this works. So Natalie come on over, let's put you right about here, we'll put you're right about there and let me get a good reading let me raise your slide up just a little bit and I'll get a good clean light reading on you, and I'm going to use just one light on the set and I'm not going to use another accent light or another background light or anything else, so I miss going to fire this off and get a good exposure here, so I'm 11 2/3 OK this is pretty good. Let's just put togher, let's just do this for me. Can you just turn to your left a little bit? Yep good and now once you bring your head back around swerve towards the light abit and just push your hair back on the right just a tiny bit so I can see your eyes. OK let me just fire one off here and we'll take a look, good. So our first test shows it does a real nice job and in this distance, that light because of the source and because is broad as the umbrella is, you can see she's a good 12 or 15 ft, maybe even 20 ft to the background wall. Well we've got enough light in here from that umbrella that's kind of spinning around because it goes everywhere, that is also lighting up the background for us, and that's got to be one of the options when you make your choices on your life shaping. If you're running short of number of studio strobes that you have for example, and you've got to get some light in the background then maybe you switch from a softbox to an umbrella because you can get some light back to the background really easily can't do that with any other light source. So it's really a good choice for this sort of thing, let me shoot a couple of here really quick and let me come in on her face and give her some options here, here we go nice, good, that's real pretty right there, good. Let's turn you a little bit more to your left, yeah now bring your ass a little too much, come back, that's good, right there, now bring your head around that's it, your eyes are ready, hear me, perfect. Good let me do one of those. Excellent I'm just going to drop that light just a little bit lower, I'm going to drop it down because One of the things that happens as the lights spreads like that, the origin of the light was just high enough that I was losing the catch lights in the eye and we can't lose the eyes. We can't lose catch lights in the eye folks. If you don't have a great catch light in your eyes, your eyes kind of look dead and so I've always found that the pictures will have more impact if you've got good rich good catch lights in the eye, and we can even make that source a little bit softer by increasing it by simply just moving it closer. So let me do that, let me bring that a little bit closer and then I'll take one more series here, and then we'll move on to the next thing. So let me bring it in a little bit closer, and now let me just take a quick reading here. I'm using my Sekonic 758, and of course the reading is getting quite a bit higher at this distance. Now I'm over 16, 16 ⅓. I can do one more thing, here we go, that's good, good. Chin up just a tiny bit for me, right and bring your head around, just a little. Just push your hair back just as tiny bit more for me, that's it right there nice, nice, nice, good. This time let's just turn your shoulders to me a little bit this way, a little bit more, your feet, legs, hips, everything. There you go. G Good. Now bring your head back, just slightly right there. That's it, nice. Let the top of your head just tip over just a bit, chin down a little bit for me, right there, and chin back up a little bit, sorry. That's it, that's better, good. A little smile in this one right in your eyes, there you go, good, good excellent, excellent. So now we've got a nice mid tone gray background, and it's great. You can work a single light source like this and do head shots all day long for actors, models, that sort of thing, and it works really well. So just to wrap up, an umbrella is going to be a great light source if you've got to light a large area or a lot of people. In this case we're in a very large studio here. If I want to shoot a full length of her and get a nice shadow from her legs, and a nice light source going on at background I can't really do that with anything else, but I can do it with an umbrella. If I've got a group of 35, 40 people I can light that with two umbrellas, and I couldn't do that with any other light source. So it's really a good source. It's very universal source and it does have a right to exist if you will. Not the first choice for a tight head shot all the time, but a really great source of light. Now let's move on to the Octabank. This is a nice large source, and that's what we'll get set up next, and we'll do some real nice beautiful light soft light portraits on her face.

Tony Corbell

Tony has been very fortunate having photographed three U.S. presidents, 185 World Leaders, 65 Nigerian Heads of State, about 600 brides and grooms, a couple of NASA astronauts and lots of famous and not so famous faces. He has spoken at almost 400 seminars and workshops nationally and internationally and is the recipient of the highest honor from the Wedding and Portrait Photographers International with their Lifetime Achievement Award. Tony also achieved the status of Photographic Craftsman from the Professional Photographers of America. In 2005, Tony received the "Photographer of the Year" Award from the International Photographic Council of the United Nations at a ceremony in New York at the U.N. and the PPA National Award from the Professional Photographers of California. Tony was also invited to join the prestigious Camera Craftsmen Of America in 2007, one of only 40 members worldwide. In 2007/08, Tony spoke to over 7,500 photographers in 36 cities including London, Glasgow, Dublin, Toronto, Mexico City, Sydney and many more U.S. cities. Tony has always been active as a student and a teacher of photographic education and his Basic Studio Lighting book from publisher AmPhoto has been popular worldwide and has been the basis for numerous photographic college lighting courses. He has written articles in every major photographic magazine in the U.S., Japan, the U.K. and China. He is currently one of a select few Approved Photographic Instructors from the Professional Photographers of America, and he's the biggest Beatles fan alive.