Learn How To Design The Optimal Lighting Setup For Your Individual Portrait Subject

Flawless lighting is the key to creating professional-caliber portraiture. With the right lighting, photographers can create depth and form, set the mood of the portrait, and sculpt the subject's features to create an idealized portrait presentation that will please the subject and satisfy the photographer's artistic vision.

All too often, photographers fall into the trap of selecting and using tried-and-true, one-size-fits-all lighting strategies for their clients. An obvious benefit to this practice is that this is a streamlined approach. Without the guesswork involved in playing with the lights to determine a lighting pattern that best suits the subject, the photographer can move more quickly through the session, book more sessions, and maximize their profits. However, in doing so, they will sell themselves short artistically and will never produce the images that will best flatter their clients.

In this book, Sculpting with Light, author Allison Earnest "shows photographers how to take full control of their lighting". First, you'll learn how the physics of light govern the way we see it, and how the camera perceives it differently than the human eye. Also learn about the qualities of incident and reflected light, and how the size of the source, the direction of the light, the light intensity, contrast, and ratio between highlight and shadow will affect the mood of the portrait as well as how to best use the tools for modifying light and master its every nuance.

As you move through the book, you'll get can't-miss tips for sculpting the face with basic lighting setups. You'll learn the three desirable positions for the main light and how to best refine the lighting strategy using minimal equipment. You'll learn how to create the lighting patterns most often used in portraiture and will also discover how you can create the portrait effect you're after, from a fashion-type look, to a soft, romantic feel, to an edgy, high-contrast look, by manipulating the light output to create the desired ratio of highlight and shadow on your subject.

Unique to Sculpting With Light is Earnest's focus on using lighting to sculpt a variety of basic facial shapes, oval, long and angular, heart-shaped, and square, and show subjects at their personal best. Makeup artists have always relied on cosmetics to highlight and shade areas of the face to play upon a subject's best features and draw attention away from perceived flaws. However, this is an opportunity that most photographers overlook in their haste to create cookie-cutter portraits with minimal changes to the lighting setup. Allison Earnest shows readers how to choose and easily set up the best lighting for each individual client, male or female, to produce a likeness that makes them feel attractive. After all, a client must like the way they look in their portraits in order to spend their money on your images.

Covering a wide variety of techniques and images that show the impact of using basic and complex lighting setups on individual or multiple subjects, both male and female, this amply illustrated book will prove an indispensable guide for photographers or all skill levels.

Website: http://www.amherstmedia.com/