Fstoppers Lighting Diagrams- One Light with Pegboard

Pegboard is such a fun material to use when experimenting with lighting. You can change the shape of the light pattern by changing the distance of your light to the pegboard and the distance of the pegboard to your subject. We posted previously about how you can use pegboard to construct an entire backdrop. In this week's diagram I will show you how I used one speedlite and a small strip of pegboard to shape the light in my shoots.

For this shoot with Exitmusic, I used a 2x4' panel of brown pegboard and placed it in front of a red-gelled speedlite to the right of the subjects. As you may notice, the closer the board is to the subject, the smaller the spots of light appear. As they angle away, the become more even and bleed into lines of light.

The pegboard is overhead in this product shot I did for JackThreads.

I decided to use the pegboard as a main light in this Day of the Dead shoot. Initially I had three lights going in to the shoot, but two of them, I had discovered, had crapped out on me. I still wanted to shoot my light through the pegboard (which would be turned into shafts of light by the smoke machine I brought) but also have it light the backdrop as well. The wall behind the backdrop was an addition, so there was a five foot space between the top of the wall and the ceiling. This allowed me to rest one end of the pegboard on the wall and clamp the other end to a boom arm. I used a second boom arm to position my speedlite two feet above the pegboard, shooting down on the subject.

This shot was done using two lights. One was shot into a white backdrop, one foot behind brown pegboard and there is an umbrella over the product, with a reflector underneath the glass.

Lighting lessons like this one as well as 25 other lighting diagrams are available in my new e-book, RGLR, The Run & Gun Lighting Resource for $10.