The “Monster” Light For Beauty Shots?

The “Monster” Light For Beauty Shots?

by William Lulow

What really is “Monster Lighting?” Well, it’s not a lighting that you would use often except, perhaps, on Halloween. It’s the scary kind you get when you put a flashlight under your face. This lighting is obtained by placing a light beneath the subject’s face. It casts harsh shadows upwards. An example:

Now this image was produced with a single light bounced off of a white card placed below the model’s face. A much more scary image could be made with simply one light placed in the same position.

You can see the scary-type shadows the light casts. So, you would never want to use this lighting in a normal headshot. However, when used with a large, soft mainlight placed above the camera, it becomes a fill-in light which takes away all the shadows created by the Monster Light:

If you look carefully at the above image, you can see the “catchlights” (reflections of the studio lights) in the model’s eyes. That lets you know exactly where the lights were placed and, you can see that there was one above the subject and the Monster Light below. The concept is that both lights, used together, will virtually eliminate any trace of shadow on the face. The one thing you have to remember however, is that the light that acts as the fill-in light (usually the Monster Light, in this case) has to be one stop less than the main light. The reason for this is that otherwise, you might end up with competing sets of shadows if the lights are of equal intensity.

So, the Monster Light becomes an essential part of my beauty lighting set up. If you keep the ratio between the main and fill at approximately 1:3. This lighting actually surrounds the face and leaves it without shadows; a perfect lighting for beauty shots. It actually tries to duplicate the effects of a makeup mirror that provides a surrounding kind of light for the face. Take a look at some more examples:

This lighting simply follows the basic fill-in light formula. The only difference is the position of both the main and fill lights. Main light is in the Hollywood Light position and the fill is in the Monster Light position. You can also do variations of this kind of set up by changing the position of the Monster fill-in light. You can move each light off the subject’s axis slightly to get this kind of lighting:

Here the main light was moved slightly to camera left position but the fill-in was still kept in the Monster Light position. Here’s yet another example:

This image has the main light off to camera left and the fill-in (Monster Light) on camera right. The thing to remember about this setup is to make sure that both lights are opposite each other and that the fill-in light is about half the strength of the main light.