Portraits: Natural and Flash

About this talk

This informative and fun presentation shows essential approaches in using light to create a flattering or compelling portrait. Light has three major attributes: direction, quality and depth. Bobbi and Lee will show how to work with both natural light and Speedlights. Good lighting techniques, along with posing, tonalities, mood, expression, camera angles and backgrounds must harmonize to create a successful photographic portrait.

Everyone has natural light available, but not necessarily the understanding of how to find it and manipulate it with reflectors. We work with window light, backlight, open shade and garage door lighting and explore how the qualities of each contribute to the feeling of the portrait.

Portable flash is a wonderful tool and it will be explained step by step on how to choose the correct settings and modifiers for Fill Flash and for using the flash as a main light. WE cover exposure modes of TTL and manual, and shooting with the flash on and off the camera.

The presentation is a combination of live shooting demos with window light, reflectors and portable flash with a variety of modifiers. We wrap up with a Lightroom lesson in creating great skin tone and texture with the Sultan of Skin, Lee Varis.