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Follow these five tips when working with new models

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We all start somewhere and if you’re a new photographer learning the ropes, you’ll likely prefer to get some practice in without having to hire a professional model for every single new idea or piece of kit you want to try out.

Don’t get me wrong, I highly recommend you pay for models when trying new ideas, as this can often remove a lot of the stress from a shoot. Paying for a model often means you’re paying for their expertise in posing and angles, and this can mean it’s one less thing for you to worry about. You’ll likely have enough going on with technical traumas, lighting placement, exposures, camera operation and much more, so paying a professional model who knows how to pose is always a huge help.

But what if you’re starting out and simply don’t have the budget just yet for a professional model?

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How to shoot a clean and simple coloured fill portrait in the studio

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Sometimes you just want a clean and quick setup to start a shoot off the right way. Sure, you may have a ton of creative ideas in store for later on in the day, but they may be new ideas you’ve never tried before or they may be more experimental. If that’s the case, I always find it smart to start a shoot with a tried and true setup that’s not too tricky to do, quick to set up and provides great shots each and every time.

That way, the team knows that whatever happens from here on out with the more experimental work, we’ve already bagged some killer images and everybody is positive about the setups to come.

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Lighting setup: Indoor swimwear shoot

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Shooting swimwear outside in natural light is nearly always the best solution, after all, the bright, crisp sunshine is an easy-win when it comes to making swimwear look good. But what if an outdoor shoot simply isn’t practical or even possible due to location and of course weather?

In this article I’ll discuss a simple indoor setup that can be created in almost any sized space and with standard kit. This setup isn’t trying to synthesise daylight indoors like I’ve done before, but it is about recreating that feeling of an outdoor shoot and I’ll share a couple of tricks I employ to do just that.

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How to set up and recreate caustic lighting for portraits in the studio

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Don’t be alarmed! Yes, the title of this article may seem a little bizarre, no it’s not helping my SEO, but I assure you that there’s actually a scientific reason behind its ‘caustic’ name.
For many years I’ve played with the idea of recreating various lighting looks that many of us may know and love from the natural world around us. Sure, we can buy fancy lighting modifiers that all serve a purpose, but sometimes their look can be a little too clinical, and frankly boring. Yes, once again I’m looking directly at you, softbox users. I guess we all start somewhere though ;)

Now that I’ve ostracised half of my readers in the first paragraph, let’s see if Jake’s latest DIY lighting modifier is actually any good!

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How to shoot long exposure portraits combining flash and continuous light in the studio

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Sometimes it can be great to flex your skills and show off your lighting prowess, but we can often run into the danger of the image being more about the lighting technique rather than the look of the final image itself. This is something I always try and hammer home when I’m teaching new techniques.

Is there anybody here old enough to remember the horrendous HDR portraits of the early 2000s? The images were all about showing off the latest HDR technique rather than the subjects themselves and the results were nothing short of terrifying. Too young and have no idea what I’m talking about? Just Google HDR portraits and you’ll see what I mean.

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Lighting setup: Textured fashion lighting with coloured gels

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I spent many, many years working in a busy studio that focused on quantity over quality. As photographers working there, we did our best to push back against this where we could, but sometimes you only had 20-30 minutes with a client to achieve a handful of different looks and sadly this invariably led to you often reverting to the simplistic, yet professional looking white background shots out of necessity.

It was ultimately the repetitive nature of this white background work that spawned my gelled lighting that many of you know today. It really was a simple case of ‘shoot something different or go mad!’.

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Lighting Technique: How to photograph people with top-down sci-fi lighting

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I’m sure you’ll all be pleased to hear that it’ll be a short and sweet one this week ;) Nothing mind-bending or buried in lighting theory, just a simple 2 light setup with some colour! – (famous last words).  The idea behind this look for me was to create a sci-fi style of light coming directly from above. Couple that with some contrasting colour from below and a little separation behind and I’m done.

In my mind I wanted it to be smokey or hazey like those spooky 80s sci-fi movies. So either a misty night or even smoke from spaceship exhaust – think, ‘Close encounters of the third kind’. This isn’t strictly super-relevant, but early ideas like this can help you immensely when it comes to lighting a subject if you know what you’re trying to achieve first.

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Lighting setup: Combining hard and soft light

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Trigger Warning: Yes these shots are of a young lady in her underwear and no that is certainly not necessary for this setup to work. Truth be told; we were working on a separate shoot and model, Grace kindly allowed me to quickly grab some of these shots to illustrate this article and lighting concept for you. The simple shots here are really only to show the lighting technique behind combining hard and soft light and what benefits it can have. Once you understand the reasoning and benefits of lighting in this way, you’ll quickly realise just how far you can take it and how versatile it can be.

Like I mentioned, this hard-&-soft-light-combined is a very simplistic concept at its core and once you see it in practice, you’ll quickly see how you can develop it further with other modifiers and setups. So although I don’t use this particular method myself any more today, I used it a ton when I started to play with it many years ago for headshots and hair campaigns. To understand the benefits of lighting with hard and soft light combined, let’s first look at what isolated hard and soft light means to us as portrait photographers.

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How to shoot portraits outdoors with a DIY dappled natural light background

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I’ve posted a few natural light setups and techniques recently and although this setup isn’t as tricky or as involved to achieve as those, this is a nice little idea to play with if the occasion arrises. The good news is, you barely need any kit to make this work and truth be told, I was actually packing away my lighting gear when I saw this natural light pattern form on my scrim after a shoot. I quickly asked the model back and decided to grab a few frames as the naturally formed dappled light background looked amazing. Here’s how to get the same look yourself…

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