How To Teach Lighting For Photography

Note: This article an the one that follows serve as a kind of primer for those interested in really taking their photographic efforts to new levels!

How To Teach Lighting For Photography

by William Lulow

There are many photographers and lighting technicians out there who certainly know what they are doing and how to achieve the results they want. They have studied the craft a while and know the fine points of using various lighting tools. They are very good at what they do. TEACHING NOVICES WHAT THEY DO and how they do it is an entirely different matter. I don’t believe that simply showing someone how to set up a particular studio lighting is enough, by itself. Successful teaching involves several steps:

1. The student needs to be ready to learn, that is, he or she needs to have the right motivation and the requisite interest.
2. It helps if the student has the right equipment with which to learn.
3. The information needs to be explained in a step-by-step process so that each one can be digested properly.
4. The student then needs to be able to practice the lessons and the results need to be objectively assessed so that the student can determine whether or not the lesson was successful.

As a note about learning photography, when I set out to learn how to do studio portrait lighting, I first studied every single fashion magazine I could get my hands on. I examined each of the beauty shots and other portraits closely. I went to countless museums and gallery shows mounted by the great masters of portraiture at the time: Avedon, Penn, Karsh, Halsman, Steichen as well as the photography of numerous other practitioners just so I could absorb their various styles and approaches. I studied the great landscape photographers: Adams, Weston, Winogrand, Galen Rowell, Eugene Atget, Cartier-Bresson, Feininger, and many more. My immersion in the craft was total and complete. I wanted to know everything I possibly could about various photographers who had come before me, what they did, how they worked and what their images looked like. I then made thousands upon thousands of images on film, developing and printing them to exacting specifications. I learned what goes into making a great negative and a great print.I learned how to achieve consistency in my results so that I could count on them time and time again!

Anything you really want to learn well has to be approached with some amount of the same fervor and concentration.

Once you have mastered the art and have become a successful photographer, that means that you have really understood just about everything the craft has to offer and have also used the various techniques yourself in various capacities. It’s another thing entirely to be able to teach others how to do it well. That also requires knowing how to teach. Something I also studied with equal amounts of energy. 

I had an experience which taught me that many years ago, when I took a class at the International Center of Photography. The teacher was a very well-known photographer but was not effective as a teacher. Teaching is a separate skill, which also takes a lot of practice and learning to perfect.

When you teach something, you need to set up conditions under which the students are encouraged to have that special “Ah ha” moment when the basics of what they want to learn become apparent. They have to be made to see not only HOW something is done, but WHY it is done that way!

It is a combination of all the elements I mentioned above that facilitates the learning that needs to take place. It is not simply a matter of imparting information and hoping that the student picks up on it. Using a kind of “Socratic Method,” the teacher presents the information, he or she then walks the student through the lesson, the student then executes an assignment (or series of them) that reinforces the principles taught and finally the student completes an assignment on her own. Good teaching is rarely achieved by presenting some examples and then sending the student out on an assignment. Students have to be led through the process until they understand why they must do the necessary steps. If the lessons take place in a workshop or classroom-type setting, the teacher needs to see that EVERY student has the same experience.

Explanations are not enough. Students need to be guided through whatever process is being taught and then encouraged to try to copy what the teacher does.

One of the main reasons for conducting photography lessons in the studio is so that the student sees what is there, literally. A lot of information is obtained by looking at the surroundings and then using that knowledge to put together a cohesive view of what is involved in what the student is trying to learn. That is why most instructional videos often fall short of the mark. Making a video involves someone first deciding where to place the video camera, be it just an iPhone or a sophisticated setup. This inherently restricts the student’s viewpoint and often doesn’t include important and relevant information about how the studio is set up.

When we are talking about studio lighting techniques, the way I have always taught it is the way I learned it from a master, Philippe Halsman, responsible for over 100 Life Magazine covers in his heyday. Each lighting setup was shown, demonstrated and discussed including when to use it, how to use it, how to get proper exposures (before the digital age) and how to avoid various lighting pitfalls. We then went home and practiced the techniques. We brought our efforts in one at a time while Philippe exhibited every one and discussed whether or not it was successful. This is the same technique I use in my classes to this day. Once the results are shown, I then can comment on what was good about them and what, if anything could be done to improve them with the whole effort retaining an objective approach. It doesn’t become a matter of whether the teacher or other students liked the images. It is a matter of whether or not the assignment was fulfilled!

Students then leave with the support they need to continue to the next assignment while learning the intricacies of the techniques. That’s the way to assure that students have the most positive experience while learning the proper lighting setups and how to apply them. The classical lighting terms are used, not some made-up names an example of which is “clamshell lighting.” Many well known and some not-so-well known teachers use this term to describe the setup for what I call a “Hollywood Beauty Lighting.” They describe the the technique of using a mainlight placed above the subject and a fill-in light placed below the subject, but don’t really explain the difference between each light and how to use it. “Clamshell” refers to the placement of the lights like a clamshell, one above and one below, but the term doesn’t really explain what each light is supposed to do. You can set up lights in the right positions, but still not obtain the proper results because their power settings were wrong, or the actual light being used is wrong, or just the dynamics of the whole setup could be working incorrectly. So even though they may have the right idea in making their lighting setups, they often don’t know how to explain it properly.

There are certainly many ways to achieve good lighting, but one has to understand WHY they are using any particular setup. Any lighting setup needs to be applied ONE LIGHT AT A TIME in order to preserve the original idea and create a really powerful portrait.