Jeff Smith's Guide to Head and Shoulders Portrait Photography

tant to me; we have so much traffic on our white floors that, even with daily re- painting, we have to run an action on all our ...

I don’t like fooling around with small reflectors, so I have a 4x6-foot sil- ver/white reflector on the side of each camera area ...

the nose will also grow, thereby increasing the apparent size of the nose in the portrait. An Individualized Approach.This sound ...

For me, the main light normally ends up with the bottom of the light mod- ifier at about the shoulder height of the subject. The ...

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To do this, you’ll need to test your lighting so you know exactly what results you will get. It sounds so simple—almost elementa ...

both lighter and darker skin tones—setups that look good to you—while forc- ing you to get into a habit of adjusting your lighti ...

and they offer different lighting characteristic than soft-boxes. If you could imagine combining a soft-box with a spot light, y ...

He used the same technique to tone down lighter areas that were closer to the main light and would record too bright in the fina ...

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creates an artistic look with strong, heavy shadows. One of my favorite ways to use this light is simply to pose the subject lea ...

The one thing you will notice about butterfly lighting is that, when you shouldn’tuse it on a subject, you’ll know it immediatel ...

(or relatively close to those positions). The one mistake that I see many pho- tographers make is placing their lights too close ...

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While I like the boom, because I like to move the main light to unusual an- gles and heights, many photographers have a hard tim ...

First of all, when you are hired by a client, it is not “your” photography, it’s theirs. If you think of the photography you cre ...

O ne of the biggest misconceptions about head and shoulders portraits is that very little posing is needed to create a beautiful ...

and mall photography studios tend to use this very flat lighting to avoid shad- ows if the face isn’t posed properly.) Lower the ...

When the subject looks toward the lens, they seem to make eye contact with the viewer. Subjects looking off camera have a more r ...

This is achieved by turning the face toward the main light while the eyes come back to the camera. This works well for all shape ...