Interesting Lighting Techniques

Interesting Lighting Techniques

by William Lulow

A number of years ago, I was experimenting with different lighting techniques for fashion shots. I came upon a mylar, mirrored sheet (4×8) and got an idea for creating an interesting lighting. I wanted to see if I could come up with a creative use of lens flare and make it work in a fashion shot. I knew that the mylar would create various lighting patterns as well as soften up the light that was reflected. I tried placing the model in front of the mirrored panel and seeing what would happen to the light from my big, soft umbrella (which was placed directly behind the camera). Sometimes, I would position myself in front of the umbrella light itself. This is one result:

As you can see, the model was positioned in front of the mirrored surface and I could have her move to control the amount of the reflection. I noticed that when she was allowing some of the light to shine through, the mirror flared the light in an interesting way. I could control the amount of the flare by the model’s position.

Another technique was to load up a plain white background with light and let it spill over on to the model. I set up two flats with strobe heads behind them and made the light two f/stops brighter than the main light to assure that I would get some flare from them.  This was the result:

Then, I began to experiment with using the same lighting setup but cross-processing the film (which today can be accomplished by the use of a filter in Photoshop). This was the result:

In order to produce the soft effect with the lens flare, I used a Vaseline filter which was carefully placed so as to blur only the edges of the photograph. This heightened the soft effect of the lens flare. 

The point to all this is that once you know what light will do under certain circumstances, you are then free to experiment and see what different effects you can obtain. This follows my age-old adage, that you have to know the rules in order to break them successfully. When you are experimenting with your “art” this becomes of vital importance. Many photographers kind of arrive at a technique by chance. This technique is born out of a good understanding of what the light will do and how to modify it to obtain some interesting results.