At Harmon's School of Photography, we offer a Studio Lighting class about 4 times a year. It is almost always fully subscribed and unfailingly fun for all concerned. We try to get through a lot of information in this 4-week class, and all the participants get quite a bit of time behind the camera - and some in front of it also!
The first evening is devoted to the equipment used and much of the the theory behing studio lighting. In the second week, we take the students through a number of different lighting patterns - Loop, Closed Loop, Rembrandt and Butterfly - where they get the opportunity to be the photographer AND the model,as well as set the lights in position, take flash meter readings and hold reflectors. This is always a lot of fun, and the students gain a new appreciation for life on the other side of the camera.
In the 3rd and 4th weeks the students get a chance to shoot with models using a variety of different lighting setups that Susan and I arrange to demonstrate as many different 'looks' as we can in the time available. In general, we devote one of these weeks to low-key lighting styles and the other to the opposite (high-key) look.
The last two classes in this series were held in The Studio on Park, a really nice 2nd floor space in downtown Sandford, FL, courtesy of the owners, Reg Garner and Terre Lee Arrigoni. We started with a low key look using just a medium size softbox fitted with an egg crate grid, These images of Dennis and Stacy, two of the participants, typifiy the moody look we were going for.


Kyle was our model for week 3, and we started with this simple one light setup to create some nice portraits of a lovely young lady.


One of our favorite lighting setups is to use a Beauty Dish high and in front of the subject to create Butterfly lighting, and then to add a pair of accent lights in gridded stripboxes placed behind and either side of the subject at about 45 degree angles. This provides great highlights on the face and shoulders of the model, good separation from the background, and can give quite an 'edgy' look that works perticularly well with young men and very athletic subjects. We also used an Eyelighter reflector to fill in the shadows underneath Kylie's eyes and chin.

We finished Week 3 with a lighting setup made classic by local master portrait Photographer, Tim Kelly.

In this setup, the main and fill lights are positioned to camera left in large Larson softboxes. Additional fill is provided by the large reflector to camera right. This produced a very pleasing portrait of Kylie, although in retrospect, I wish we had added a hairlight to provide a little more separation.

For week 4, we switched to a lighter and brighter feel for our lighting. We started with a 4-light setup. The main light (an Einstein strobe) was placed to camera right and fired through a 7-foot Wescott White Diffusion Parabolic umbrella. Another Einstein in a large Larson sofbox provided fill from camera left, while the background was lit by a pair of Alien Bee 800 strobes in reflective umbrellas.

These large light sources made getting clean, crisp images of the lovely Madison, our model for the evening, very simple.


We then switched to a 2-light solution to get that classic white background look, by using the large Larson softbox as the background, while retaining the big Wescott shoot-through umbrella as the main light source. In this image, you can also see the iPad that we were shooting wirelessly to using the CamRanger. This incredibly useful device allowed the students to see exactly what we were shooting as we set up and finessed each lighting scenario. Stay tuned for a separate post on this great little gadget!


For a completely different look, we switched out the big Wescott shoot-through umbrella for a 64" PLM sliver parabolic umbrella from Paul C Buff. This gives a punchier light which is more focused than the larger shoot-through umbrella, and gives a nice fall-off of light down Madison's body. We did not use the background lights for this image, so as the background is not separately lit, it turns grey.


Next, we moved to using an ABR800 Ring Flash, again courtesy of Paul C Buff. Because the flash is right on the axis of the camera lens, the light is shadowless, although if you position the subject close to a background, you get the classic ringflash halo shadow.

We took this opportunity to do something a little more playful with Madison, and even got Stacy, one of our regular students, to jump in front of our camera for what I suspect might become her Facebook picture! The multiple reflections of the ring flash in Stacy's camera lens are pretty cool.


Our last setup of the night saw us switch off the strobes and turn to constant light in the form of the Wescott Spiderlites. These versatile, daylight-balanced, cool fluorescent lights are a great way to create natural-looking window light in practically any situation. We used two of these units, each in a softbox to create some nice portraits of Madison.


All the images shown above were captured with a Nikon D4, mainly using the 70-200 lens. Most of the images taken with studio strobes used a shutter speed of 1/125 second, ISO 200 and an aperture around f/11. The light from the Spiderlites is much less bright, and the image shown above was taken at 1/250 second, ISO 800 and f/2.8.
All images were processed intially in Lightroom 4. Additional processing was undertaken in Photoshop CS6 using the Portrait Professional and OnOne Perfect Suite plugins.
Thanks again to Reg and Terre for the use of their beautiful studio, and to all the participants for making this a fun class as always!
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