Hey Photographer! Thank you for joining me. I'm Fraidy Shimon from Peppermint Photography and The Editing Bootcamp! This week's video is about directional light. I want to cut light into different pieces for you so that you can understand it better. When you're doing portraits, you can have the light coming from different directions. The three main directions you can have are front light, sidelight, and backlight. These are the three main ways you can light your image. So let's jump right into it.
This week let's just tackle front light and focus on that. So what is front light? Front light is when the light is coming from behind the camera, towards the subject. When you light the subject with an even soft front light, the pros of that is that the eyes get that really beautiful, large catchlights. If you're outdoors, you would get the sky in their eyes. If you're in a studio, you would get really beautiful, large catchlights in both eyes. The light on the skin looks even, soft, and really creamy.
So here are some examples where the light was coming from the front and hitting the subject from the front. This is an outdoor image. You can see the sky in her eyes again. Again, really even light coming from the front and you can see how smooth and creamy it makes the skin look straight out of camera. These images aren't straight out of camera, but frontlight does that. Here's a studio example of front light. The light is just hitting her straight on and it's smooth. You're not really seeing the shadows because they are usually behind the subject. So when the light is coming from the front, you're usually not seeing a lot of shadows. Here's another option. Another example, catchlights, catchlights. The closer you are to the light source and also the larger, the light source is the larger your catchlights will be. So if you're shooting outside under the open sky, you'll get beautiful catchlights. If the light is coming from the front, and if you're in a studio and you keep the strobe close to the face and the light is coming from the front, you get huge, beautiful catchlights. Go out and practice your game on front light. And next week we'll talk about sidelight and how it can introduce a little bit more drama and interest in your images.
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