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Three easy portrait posing techniques for seated subjects

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Posing for portraits is always a tricky topic. There are a lot of variables to consider, including many defined by the appearance of the subject and more defined by the environment in which you’re shooting them. The more we do it, the better we get. But often, those portrait subjects are standing and there are a million examples of standing portraits out there that we can learn from and attempt to emulate.

With seated subjects, though, it can often get even more difficult. It’s not a pose that many of us often shoot vs standing portraits. There aren’t as many good examples of seated portraits out there, and it’s very easy to mess them up. In this video, Jiggie Alejandrino walks us through three basic seated poses that we can try to produce great results every time.

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How to shoot great one-light portraits in a tiny home studio

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Learning to shoot portraits at home is often a struggle. Even when you can convince one of your family members to hop in front of the camera so you can experiment and blast lights at them, you’re often constrained by space. It’s a home. It’s filled with furniture. Even if you can move it out of the way for a couple of hours, you usually don’t get a lot of room to set up and shoot.

In this video, though, Jiggie Alejandrino walks us through his journey, setting up some fantastic portrait lighting in his tiny home studio. Keeping the small space in mind, Jiggie only uses a single light for the setups in this video. But it’s more than just another “here’s how to light a subject with one light” video.

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Portrait shooters, stop being so afraid of midday sun – It’s easy to overcome with a little bit of flash

Shooting outdoors in the bright midday sun scares the pants off a lot of portrait photographers. And for good reason. The harsh midday light when the sun’s high in the sky isn’t particularly flattering. Unless you go into open shade (and even that’s not always a guarantee), there’s really no way you can position yourself and your subject that the sun is presenting flattering light on your subject.

But it doesn’t need to be so bad and you don’t need to actively avoid it, as Jiggle Alejandrino points out in this video. He loves shooting outdoor portraits in the midday sun (and, so do I!) and explains why he loves it and how he overcomes the challenges of shooting at this time of day using flash.

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Use this simple setup for gorgeous one-light portraits

While using one light for portraits is quite a simple approach, there are many ways in which you can use it. A single light lets you create all kinds of different setups, and Jiggie Alejandrino shows you one of them in his video. It’s a simple setup that will give you nice, flattering portrait light, and it will work great in a small studio space. Also, you can create it on a relatively small budget.

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Check out this amazing one-light portrait setup you’ve probably never even considered

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Portrait photographer Jiggie Alejandrino is a big fan of shooting with just a single light for portraits. He’s already shown us some pretty cool and dramatic one-light setups in the last few months. But now he’s back with a very interesting setup that most of have probably never even considered. And that’s bringing the softbox overhead pointing straight down.

It’s certainly not something I’ve usually considered. At least, not for portraits. It’s a technique I use often for small products to simulate a big cloudy sky, but with larger subjects like people, that cast some pretty obvious shadows, how well does it work? Well, looking at Jiggie’s demonstration, it works pretty well!

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How to turn one light into several for dramatic black and white portraits

When it comes to using just a single light source in the studio, there is a lot of great content out there, and we’ve covered some of it here on DIYP before. Often, when you want one light to look like several, though, you usually need to think about multiple shots and compositing in post – whether it be for stills or video. But you don’t have to.

Photographer Jiggie Alejandrino recently showed us one way to shoot dramatic portraits with just one light but now he’s back again with a new tutorial. This one adds even more drama and produces some very impressive results that most people would guess used at least two or three lights. But nope, he just uses one speedlight for these.

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Learn three dramatic portrait lighting setups with just a single speedlight and a 5-in-1 reflector

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The last few months have been a challenging time for photographers the world over. Some are now able to start getting back out and trying to lead somewhat of a “normal” life but others are still stuck at home. Whatever your case may be, many of us have somebody we can still point a camera at, and shooting portraits is a great way to practice and improve your skills when you can’t shoot your normal subjects.

While many portrait photographers will have a whole ton of lighting gear, many other photographers don’t. In this video, portrait and wedding photographer Jiggie Alejandrino shows us three very effective lighting setups we can do with just a single speedlight and an inexpensive 5-in-1 reflector.

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Photographer shoots a wedding couple on a rooftop helipad during sunset

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For many photographers, there are shots you see in your head that you one day hope to have the opportunity to create. Those visions can live there for years, just waiting to exist in the real world. For Phillipines based photographer Jiggie Alejandrino, the image above was one such photograph.

When I first saw this photograph, I was immediately drawn in. I wanted to find out more about it, so DIYP got in touch with Jiggie to get some background on the inspiration and how it was made.

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