More Teaching Techniques In Photography

More Teaching Techniques In Photography

by William Lulow

Note: Thanks to Genevieve and Brandon Alfond for their participation in this lesson. Brandon has been one of my students for a few months and has generally mastered the technique of getting good exposures with his DSLR on a consistent basis. The next step in learning photography is getting started with studio lighting. Here, he had some hands-on instruction using my studio flash lighting. He wanted to photograph his wife who is currently 7 months pregnant.

As I might have stated in a previous article, once you have mastered how to get good exposures with your camera and you feel comfortable about changing settings EVERY TIME you use it, you are then ready to learn the basics of STUDIO LIGHTING. Light is really the “fourth side” of the EXPOSURE TRIANGLE because once you have exhausted the camera’s settings in an effort to obtain optimal results with your exposures, the only thing left to do is to ADD MORE LIGHT!

The way to do this should be fairly straight-forward, but many photographers go out and buy lights for their studio or home studio without knowing how to apply them correctly.

I had a great session the other day with Brandon, who has come to me fairly often to learn how to manipulate his camera to get great exposures. He was familiar enough with the process and wanted to learn more about studio lighting. We started from the beginning with HOLLYWOOD LIGHTING, one hot light on a stand, placed high above the camera and just about at the same spot. Here’s what the setup looked like in my home/studio:

Note the height of the light here and how the camera position is such that it looks like it and the light are on the same plane vis-a-vis the subject. This is what the final image looked like:

Here you can see the full effect of the lighting with the shadow under the nose and the dark background.It’s often better to start with traditional “hot lights” because whatever intensity the bulb is determines your exposure. You don’t have to fuss with power settings as you do with studio electronic flash units.

The next lighting setup we used was the REMBRANDT LIGHTING which looked like this:

This is the setup for the REMBRANDT LIGHTING. You can see the light placed to the left of the camera position, but still up high. This is what the photograph looked like:

Here, you can see the tell-tale triangle of light under the light’s opposite eye. It is a classic REMBRANDT LIGHT. Next we set up a SIDE LIGHT:

Here, the light is hidden behind a gobo or shade, but it is placed 90 degrees to camera left and lights only the side of the subject’s face. You can see the shadows it produces. These lighting setups produce DRAMATIC images because of the shadows they create. If you wanted more detail, you would need to fill in the shadows with some other source of light. But those lessons are for another article.

These are the three types of MAIN LIGHT you can use with just one light. You can readily see their effects. The kinds of images they produce are very different in tonal quality and mood. You need to experiment with them to see which ones work best for the types of photographs you like to produce.

Here are a couple more images I produced with just one light:

This one was made with just one light bounced into an umbrella to fill in shadows caused by having the sun from the subject’s back.

My early portrait of conductor, Mitch Miller, made with just one light. Since he somewhat resembled Rembrandt, I had to use a REMBRANDT LIGHTING on him.

This is an example of an EDGE LIGHTING (not actually mentioned here). I will talk about this in future articles. Again,  this is with just one light. So, these are the basic types of studio lighting all of which can be modified by adding other lights in a step-by-step process which I explain in my various workshops, private classes and on-line sessions. I should also add that these lightings can be executed in a smaller space such as my home/studio. Since most of my work is “on location” these days, I don’t need the extra expense of a separate studio.

One light can be a very effective way to achieve some dramatic results in portraiture. Many photographers who possess enough lighting equipment often try to use all or most of it without thinking about what kind of image they want to produce. Try using one light and see what kinds of pictures you can make.