10 Studio Portraits [Digital + BW Film]

Studio Portraits verses Natural Light
When portrait photographs are composed and captured in a studio, the photographer has control over the lighting of the composition of the subject and can adjust direction and intensity of light. There are many ways to light a subject's face, but there are several common lighting plans which are easy enough to describe.
Yousuf Karsh was an eminent portrait photographer

Light Source
One of the most important things of a good light source is its size. This determines what type of shadows you are going to have and also affects the type of reflection. Small light sources will produce a hard edged shadow, large light sources will produce a soft edged shadow.The most important light source in our life, the SUN. In a nice bright day with no clouds the sun will act as a small light source. On the other hand when it is a cloudy day the clouds will act as diffuser and the light source will not arrive from a direct single point but will be diffused through the clouds thus becoming a large light source and therefore producing soft edged shadows.

Winston Churchill by Yousuf Karsh

Lighting Angles

A person looking at an object sees each point of that object at a slightly different angle. If we sum up all these angles we would have a family of angles. The family of angles is very important thing to master as a photographer because it determines where we can place or where we cannot place our lights.

For this Studio Portrait Assignment, you are going to work with three basic lighting angles: Hatchet/Side Lighting, Rembrandt, and Glamour/Butterfly lighting.

Studio Lighting Preparation Assignment

1. Find an example of each lighting set-up/formation as we went over in class from the internet and post in your journal (like figure 1).
2. Explain how the lighting set up is arranged to create this effect.
3. Find some examples of each lighting effect and save them to your blog.
4. Find a studio lighting tutorial and link it to your blog.
5. Plan out your shoot in your blog include the following considerations for each lighting scenario: model, costume, background, framing (see "Overview of Shot Sizes" sheet), props? makup?

Below is an example of a Rembrandt Lighting set-up:


Glamour/Butterfly Lighting

 

Rembrandt Lighting                         Side/Hatchet Lighting

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