A Few Interesting Creative Lighting Techniques

I recently ran into a few videos showing off some really creative lighting techniques. And I mean more than multi-light setups and such.

In this in-depth lighting tutorial see how photographer Ab Sesay uses a Sekonic L-478DR to dial in a simple two-light setup using a spotlight and a ring light.

This was a really neat idea. I mean I certainly had never thought to stack a gelled ring flash in front of a spot light. Admittedly you could get close to the same effect by using either a honeycombed reflector or snoot on your key light and then gelling your fill lights. But if I had to guess you most likely wouldn’t get the hard edges like you see here.

https://www.youtube.com/user/adoramaTV Join Daniel Norton OnSet as he creates dappled patterns of light for a fun portrait look. Often times when we are using natural light, we see patterns coming through trees/fences etc and use that light to accent our portraits. With this technique you can do it in a consistently repeatable fashion.

This is one idea I have been wanting to experiment with: using a cucoloris (also known as a “cookie”) . I have been thinking about ways to give our studio backgrounds a bit more texture and this is one way to do it. While you can buy them it’s also not difficult to make one yourself with either poster or foam board. The interesting bit to think through is what shapes and patterns to cut out.

https://www.youtube.com/user/adoramaTV In this episode, Mark Wallace explains how to create a simple gobo to create patterns on a white background for more interesting portraits. Mark also goes into detail about setting up lighting for beautiful portraits using an octobox, grid, and a white panel to bounce light.

Here’s another way to use easily available material to do interesting things with light. Just by cutting holes in aluminum foil you can create really neat patterns. I particularly like this idea because there’s a bit more of a ‘random factor’ compared to using a cookie. Tear off a few sheets, poke different holes in them, and change them out every few shots. It would certainly lead to more variety.

For a while now I had been wondering what exactly was the difference between the term cucoloris and gobo if they effectively do the same thing. It turns out that it all just hinges on how close they are to the light source. A gobo is meant to be used right next to the light where a cookie is meant to be used at distance. Now in most typical cases the use of a gobo is intended to put out well defined shapes of light. But as you can see in the third video gobos can provide gentle lighting effects as well.

Hopefully this gives people some ideas they want to try with their own photos. Seeing these videos have certainly given me some things to try.