Photography Studio Equipment: Portrait Lighting Patterns

Video Transcript

"In this clip we're going to talk about some basic portrait lighting. The first thing we're going to do is use our stand in here so that we don't have to bring in a model for this. The first thing we're going to do is split lighting which is, as you can see from the light pattern on here, the face is split exactly in half. This side is in high light. This side is in shadow. One of the main reasons you would use this type of lighting is if someone is wearing a hat. You see it a lot in cowboy movies because if the hat's here it does not change the lighting pattern on the face. It makes it real nice and easy to control the lighting. The second lighting pattern we're going to do will be Rembrandt lighting. I'm showing all this with basically a hard light. I would normally shoot people with, with a soft box and umbrella. The reason I'm doing this is so the patterns are very specific and you can see them. On Rembrandt lighting, on the shadow side of the face you have a little triangle of light which you can see right here. It should not bleed into the eye and it should not extend down below the nose. This particular lighting pattern was made famous by Rembrandt the artist. He actually had a skylight in his studio and the light that fell on his subjects was exactly this light. We still use it today. It's a difficult lighting pattern to do with people with small bridges on their nose or very shallow eyebrows. Another type of lighting is loop lighting which, let's see if I can get this exactly right, this is loop lighting. It's called loop lighting because of the shadow formed from the nose formed to loop coming down and it should stop right at the corner of the mouth. It's kind of a loose Rembrandt in the fact that you still kind of have a triangle here. In fact, if you just turn her head a little bit it's pretty easy to come up with, with the Rembrandt. This loop lighting is called that because of this shadow. The other type of lighting, which I'll move the subject instead of the light, is called butterfly lighting and the light traditionally is directly in front of the subject and aimed down. This is called butterfly lighting because of the shadow pattern that forms underneath the nose. It, this lighting is used a lot in old Hollywood style images. It's used on women that have a really nice mask on their face which is the inside of the cheekbones. The nice thing about this is it separates the face from the neck because of the proximity of the light it throws a shadow on the neck and forces the viewer to look at just the mask of the face. It's a really nice light to use on young women."