From the course: Portrait Photography: Ten Styles with One Light

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Split light

Split light

- Next up in our lighting patterns is split lighting, and this is a really dramatic one. It's not necessarily a flattering light, although it can show a lot of character, especially we often use it on men, or athletes, or very dramatic looking pictures. Let me show you how simple it is to do. All we've got to do, in this case I'm going to drop this light just a little bit, kind of like this, and then I'll have Tina turn back towards the camera and you'll see just how simple it is to do split lighting, just like that. One half of her face is illuminated and the other is not. Again, we can alter the depth of that shadow. We can bring in a reflector. We could use a slower shutter speed so that the light nearby us is lightening her face, but that's pretty much it. Split light with the main light only illuminating one half of her face. It's really cool for athletic pictures, for anything where we want to show a lot of texture, drama, grit, is really closely associated with a split light…

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