From the course: Portrait Photography: Ten Styles with One Light
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Go with a big light
From the course: Portrait Photography: Ten Styles with One Light
Go with a big light
- When you want to make a flattering portrait of a person, it's best to use soft light. Soft light gives shadows and highlight transitions that are very gentle, whereas a hard light gives you a definite line between highlight and shadow areas. A soft light comes from a large light. Now, you know the sun is an enormous light, right? It's like 300 million miles across. But in relation to people on earth, it's very small up there in the sky. And so, in our cases here on earth, it casts a very hard light. That's why we use modifiers like soft boxes, reflectors, umbrellas. These things help us to enlarge a small light source and make it more flattering for all kinds of people. Some people look great with a hard light shining on them, and a hard light helps us create certain moods that we'll also discuss in this course, but this section is about how to use modifiers to make small lights large and some of the instances when you'll want to use the various modifiers out there.
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