Hard Lighting Breakdown

Today we're looking at using hard light in the studio. Stuff like this, this, and this. And maybe even this. This is a money-making look. We're gonna break down the lighting in these shots today. It's very bright, crisp, hard shadows, looks like sunlight. It's a high-end look that I love. It picks up some shine on the face, it gives a really amazing eye light, and overall the hard light really has something special about it. It's actually very simple, and the foundation of it is to use a small source far away. In this particular case, I really just wanted it to look like sunlight. I wanted to just illuminate the room as if we were not in a room at all, like we were on a white wall outside, sunny day, with not a cloud in the sky. All right, so here we can see a little bit of how this was done. Our key light was an Aputure 300D with just nothing on it. The light was also 15 to 20 feet behind me and 10 to 12 feet in the air. I can't remember exactly the percentage that it was at, but it was very, very low. Low percentage, far away, and high up. And depending on what shot we were taking and how close we were, we would move things around a little bit. You gotta feel it out when you're in there and make tweaks as needed. So here's a shot where it's kind of a little bit more off to the side. I like the shadow on her neck, and then there's just a little shadow of the nose on her right side, because the light is a little bit off to the right here. It's very straight on. The light might be two degrees off from behind the camera. We added a four-foot quasar tube here. These are daylight. They're like 75 bucks a piece. I have a dimmer for them, so it's great. I love using them as a backlight. They're affordable, dimmable, and kind of just easy to move around. We also have a V-flat over here on the left. It wasn't necessarily to fill in the side of her face, because the light was pointed pretty much straight at her face. It was to just brighten up the shadows a little bit. It's still hard, but not as dark. One of the reasons that I got into using hard light in the studio was because of the eye light. Have the talent stand there, look in the camera, and raise the light until it's at a good spot in the eye. Another thing that is important, if using only two lights like this, you need to consider how far away your light is from the background, and how far away your talent is from the background. The further you pull everything away from the background, the less exposure the background will have. We were very close to the back wall, maybe three or four feet, just close enough so that we would not see her shadow on the wall. Okay, so here's another shot, a little bit wider here. We could still see that nice eye light. We could see the shine on her hair, a little bit of the shadow on her neck, the shine in her nails, the hard shadow on her shirt. I love it. Another thing that was important for us on this shoot was a little bit of variety. There was an element of this that was going from the nighttime to the morning, and the evening to the nighttime, where we still utilize the same lights, but within shots that are using hard light, it often looks very cool to have something different. While this is not as hard of light as before, it does have a really nice look. And this was the quasar tube over top of her, just as it was before, and the 300D bounced into a V-flat off to her one side, and some fill here. Lastly, just because we talked about this shot in the last video about creating the grade that you're seeing right now, this time it's actually sunlight coming in. We could see some hard lines on her shirt, a little bit of glow in her arm. It's not overpowering on her face, and just an overall really nice look. It's really good to know how to do this in the studio, and it's really good to be able to adapt and make little moves, but with a concrete foundation in your mind of how you wanna shoot. I think that a lot of people are hesitant to use it. It's a little bit more of a bold decision, but the final look just has something special to it. An Aputure 300D, $949, and a Quasar T8 dimmable tube, 75 bucks. All we've used to create these looks. So this is not something that's totally unachievable. You can do this in a small space. You can do this in your garage. I've done this in pretty small rooms and had a great look, and a lot of time for stuff like this, we're just chest up. So you don't need a huge gigantic studio to shoot something like this. A couple years ago when I got the studio that we shot this in for like seven months, I would stand in front of the camera and do every single combination of lighting that I could do, all different distances, the light in all different positions, all the way around me. It was because of some of that testing that I landed on this exact look that I used for this shoot. I think it's just a beautiful look. All right, that about covers it for this particular shoot. Next week I'm gonna break one down that we did in a kitchen, in a studio kitchen. In the meantime, if you have any questions, hit me up, peace. That's the ending, that's what I'm doing, I'm cutting the cameras.