Wanderlust Workshop: Lighting Techniques
While in Antigua, we took full advantage of our stay at the gorgeous Hotel Cirilo to test out several lighting techniques. This monumental hotel was built with and around 16th century church ruins that remain from a devastating volcanic eruption during that time period.
The grounds quickly became the backdrop for our second lighting seminar of the workshop where we practiced six techniques including dramatic high side light, triple exposure, backlight bounce, the clamshell, mixing light sources and painting with light.
While on location, we’re often limited in the equipment available, but I make sure to pack a portable beauty dish as it’s so versatile when lighting various scenarios. In this case, it allowed us to create dramatic butterfly lighting on the face using the beauty dish on a monopod that is held up high and to the side of the subject.
Next on the agenda was creating triple exposed images with a long shutter speed and a Canon 600 speedlite. The subject is then able to move to three different areas within the frame and the flash is fired three separate times to capture each exposure within the same image. The key to this technique is having a very dark background unless you want the subject to be more transparent within the image.
Another technique that is used to create separation between the subject and the background is backlight bounce where a flash is set up directly behind the model to illuminate multiple angles of the person in the photograph. This creates a bright hair light around the subject and sometimes lens flare. At the same time, there needs to be a reflector off to the side that bounces fill light onto the side or front of the subject depending on where you want the light.
A new lighting technique that I recently picked up while attending WPPI2014 is “the clamshell”. The basic idea behind this multi-light setup is to use a single large light source both as the main light and to provide a wrap around fill light. In this instance, we had the model lay on a flat surface with the reflector below her tilted upwards and used the beauty dish on a monopod above the model to establish the wrap around light that fills in any remaining shadows to create the soft dewey look.
