I attended a workshop hosted by Mark Coventry from Mark Coventry Photography (website details below).
During this workshop Mark covered the following;
How light works. Sync speed. Lighting modifiers. Hard and Soft light. Light placement and distance. Light falloff and backgrounds. Standard lighting patterns.
We had Kirsty join us during the practical session to allow Mark to demonstrate the way light works when shooting portraits. We covered how to change the backgrounds colour just by using light, for example we had a grey backdrop and we was shown how to make this look black and white in camera.
We learnt about how to light a model from different angles to create different effects such as
- Loop lighting a technique that creates a loop-shaped shadow under the subject’s nose.
- Split lighting a technique where the subject’s face is somewhat divided into equal halves
(one appearing on the light and the other in the shadow).
- Butterfly lighting - creating a butterfly like shadow just beneath the subject's nose.
- Short lighting with this technique the subject’s face is directed towards the camera.
- Broad lighting - the opposite of the short lighting technique here most of the subject’s face is lighted while a smaller part of it is covered in shadow.
After the main session of learning all these techniques Mark allowed us to set up the studio ready for us to take some photographs of Kirsty. Using our new lighting knowledge we decided what colour we wanted the background to be and we set up for a grey backdrop look highlighting the floor to create depth. We used lights to either side of Kirsty using long soft boxes and a light in front of Kirsty, we later adjusted this slightly lower to the ground to allow for some floor shots.
If you live close to Essex and want to understand more on lighting then I highly recommend attending one of Mark's lighting workshops! I can not wait to put in to practice what I learnt from this session. I also now have a rather large list of items I would like to purchase to add to my home studio!
Mark Coventry Photography: www.markcoventry.com/