Many portrait photographers miss opportunities to elevate their work by sticking to the same techniques. Exploring creative lighting, framing, and color choices can make your portraits distinctive and more engaging.
Coming to you from Martin Castein, this informative video offers five useful techniques, beginning by addressing the importance of lighting styles. Many rely heavily on classic Rembrandt lighting, but broad lighting offers a softer and more painterly alternative. By positioning the light to illuminate the side of the face closest to the camera, you achieve a romantic and flattering effect, though it slightly broadens facial features. Castein provides a clear breakdown of how to adjust the light position depending on your subject's pose, ensuring you maintain this effect regardless of their angle.
Framing is another key focus, with Castein sharing two popular approaches: half-length and seated portraits. Half-length portraits offer a balance between capturing facial expressions and body language, creating a natural connection with viewers. Seated portraits provide more room to experiment with body positioning and gestures. Both options outperform full-length shots when you want to emphasize emotion and personality over fashion or setting.
Practical tips for working with nervous subjects round out the tutorial. Clear communication before the shoot, including mood boards or examples, helps subjects understand the vision. Warm-up sessions ease both the subject and the photographer into the shoot. Starting with seated poses simplifies the process, especially for those uncertain about how to position themselves. That's just the start of the great advice, so check out the video above for the full rundown from Castein.
His example of Rembrandt lighting isn't even close to Rembrandt lighting.
This is a variation of Rembrandt lighting that can be used in these painterly style images that are very common nowadays. It doesn't have to be hard light, soft light can be used to create the triangle of light on the opposite side that is linked to the work of Rembrandt, basically a soft light source 45 degrees on both vertical and horizontal access.
"Rembrandt lighting" is a very specific lighting defined by that triangle highlight below the eye. The video shows an example with no triangle at all, soft or hard. Calling a different lighting style "a variation of Rembrandt lighting" is like calling a saxophone a variation of a piano. (For those unfamiliar, examples from Rembrandt's own self-portraits:)
Yes I know exactly what Rembrandt lighting is and there is a "triangle" there cast by the shadow of her nose it's just a softer light source so less defined it is still clearly Rembrandt lighting pattern try it on your fairies see how you get on.
I looked again and still can't find anything that resembles actual Rembrandt lighting. And yes, I have done Rembrandt lighting on fairies. Thank you for checking my "portfolio"! :)