So what we're going to do now is start having a look at the classic lighting patterns that you can use in portrait photography. Once you understand these, these simple basic principles, you're going to find it relatively easy to start posing your subjects and lighting your subjects. Now, what I'd recommend you do as you go through this, you'll probably need to go through this section a couple of times to remember all the terms and everything we're talking about till you become familiar, but what I recommend you do is as we're going through next time you're watching a movie or you're watching anything with high quality lighting on TV, see which of these lighting patterns you can identify. And also take the time to have a look in any high end magazines where they've got high end fashion photography, or advertisement and they've got carry subjects or characters Check those out as well.

But let's go and have a look at our first lighting pattern, which is the open loop lighting. Now in all of these examples, what we're going to use is we're going to use a small speed light, which is a small light source, which is going to create a hard shadow. And the reason we're doing that is because I want you to be able to see the lighting patterns. Now, you could soften each of the lighting patterns, we're going to show you with soft boxes or umbrellas. This is more about the angle of light that we're teaching you here. So the hard shadows will help us to see that much more clearly than if we use softboxes.

So as we go throughout the next few sections, please bear that in mind. However, even with a speedlight we can still get nice lighting using these techniques. So this is our first example. This is open Loop lighting. Now what we want to do is want to look under here and this is called the loop. And now on open loop lighting, you'll have the shadow of the nose and the shadow on the cheek and there's a gap in between.

So there's a loop but it's open. And it's important to understand that so we can have this even more open, leave a slightly less open depending on where we put the light. So let's have a look at how we placed that light. So as you can see, this is a really, really simple setup. What we've got is we've got the light at 45 degrees to the face, and the face is straight on to the camera. We've also got the light slightly above or slightly above the subject unless we specifically want to like below the subject correct Dr. We should always simulate natural sunlight.

But when you do an open loop lighting pattern like this, it is just slightly above the head. As you can see we're using the bath flash, which gives us that hard shadow that we can then use to be able to see open loop lighting. So that is as simple as that. So now when we come back, it should start to make sense. The light is coming in here. As you can see, it creates a shadow that goes across, not down.

We'll talk about that later, because that is part of Rembrandt lighting, which we're going to cover so the lighting is coming across. Now that's important because we don't want shadows with open loop. We don't need shadows under the eyes. So we don't want the eyes in darkness. It's not that type of look. This is general portraiture, so we want some light in the eyes.

So if we go too high, with gonna create shadow in the eyes. And we don't want to do that on this particular shot. And now you can see we have the harsh shadow here, we've got the harsh shadow here, and we've got the open loop. Now as I said before, you don't have to shoot with a best speed light and a small light sources going to create this hard shadow. The reason I'm doing that is to show you how this actually looks. So when we go to the next example, this is open loop, but now we've put a bit of fill in on the right hand side of the subjects face.

So now we've suffered that shadow. So now you can see this is quite a dramatic look, but it's still open loop lighting, but we've just added some fill light. So let's have a look at the lighting setup for that. As you can see, again, this is really, really simple. What we've done here is we've not changed, I mean, like that still a bear speedlight or a bear flash. But on the other side, now we've got a flashing into a reflective umbrella.

And that's starting to fill in some of that heavy shadow we created with the speed line. Now, when it comes to the flash settings and those sorts of things, each of these examples will come with a PDF. So try not to be too concerned about the lighting ratios here, because you'll have that in the course if you just check down. In each section, there'll be a number of PDFs that you can just download, have a look at and gives you all the distances we've used here. All the ratios, please bear in mind that every speed like varies, but you can use the ratios as a guide. And then if yours is a little bit more powerful, take it down a little bit in power if it's a little bit underpowered, and take it up Little bit in power, but most speed lights sort of operate within the same sort of power these days.

Especially when you buy the bigger ones and not the the small, smaller flashes. So as you can see, that's a really simple light setup. So let's have a look at it from the front and the dis angle. So what have we got? all we've done is we've added this umbrella rim on that and that's given us the fill on that side of the face. So nice and simple.