My Most Recent Photoshoot

My most recent photo shoot was portraits of my friends with the six basic light patterns: Rembrandt, loop, clamshell, butterfly, split, and broad lighting.

Rembrandt lighting is when there is shadow on one side of the face with a little triangle of light on the cheek right under the eyes. There is also catchlight in the eye of the side of the face that is shadowed and no catchlight on the lit side of the face. This in my opinion was the easiest lighting pattern because I feel like it's the most natural lighting pattern on most people’s faces.

Loop lighting is similar to Rembrandt, but the difference is that the shadow on the nose and the cheek don't touch, so there is no triangle.

The next lighting pattern that was a little challenging but easily achievable was split lighting. The reason it was slightly difficult was because my split pictures always came out to close to Rembrandt lighting. What makes a picture split is when the model’s face is literally split in half between light and shadowed.

The next lighting pattern was clamshell. This lighting pattern requires two lights pointing at a diagonal angle in front of the model, creating a literal clamshell in front of them.

One of the harder lighting patterns was butterfly. The lighting has to be directly behind the camera to create a butterfly shaped shadow underneath the model’s nose. It's slightly similar to clamshell but there is a distinct difference in how the shadows and lights hit the face in the final picture.

By far, the hardest lighting pattern to achieve believe it or not was the broad lighting. Trying to create little to no shadow on the model’s face is actually more difficult than you would think. But eventually, after much trial and error, I got a portrait with broad lighting.

It was very interesting to learn so many different lighting patterns and being able to familiarize myself with how to position the lights, the model’s head, the camera and finally being able to produce the type of effect that I wanted to. It was a little time consuming, but I did enjoy gaining these new skills.