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How to get beautiful golden sunlight for perfect portraits even on cloudy days

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The city I live in boasts 300 days of sunshine a year. Except on days when I have a photoshoot booked and need sunshine, it seems! So what to do when you’ve got a client and you want beautiful golden hour light, but the weather just won’t cooperate? You fake it of course!

That’s the beautiful thing about learning to shoot with any kind of light. You aren’t beholden to the whims of metrology. In this video, Lindsay Adler walks us through her setup to create a very natural-looking golden light for her portrait shot.

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How to shoot stylized beauty portraits with just one light and a reflector

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Keeping the amount of kit you use at a low level can sometimes be down to simply a lack of availability. But it could also be that you’re simply limited in what you’re able to carry with you to shoot at a client’s location. Or, maybe you just want to bring things right back down to the bare minimum to really understand light and how your gear works.

Whatever the reason, Lindsay Adler is here to help. Using just a single strobe with a big softbox and a big reflector (in this case, a white v-flat) she creates a very effective and dramatic portrait. That’s the key word here, though. Big. Big light sources produce beautiful light for portraits as Lindsay demonstrates in this shot breakdown.

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Understand the difference between high and low key portraits and how to shoot them both

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There seems to be a lot of confusion as to exactly what high and low key portraits are and the differences between them. At least, there seems to be whenever I spend some time browsing on social media. A lot of people seem to think that high key means “overexposed” and that low key means “underexposed”. But things couldn’t be further from the truth.

In this video, fashion photographer and educator Lindsay Adler walks us through the process of creating both high and low key beauty portrait looks. She explains exactly what she’s going for with each look, why, and how she’s going to achieve it.

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Check out the high ISO performance of the Canon EOS R5

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With a lot of the overheating controversy from the video crowd (which Canon has been working on), we have to remember that ultimately the Canon EOS R5 is primarily a stills camera. And it’s a rather good one, too. It has top-notch autofocus that even beats Sony in some aspects and plenty of speed when it comes to shooting.

But how does the ISO stand up in the real world? We’ve seen some tests in more controlled conditions, but out in the wild things can often be a little different. In this video, Lindsay Adler took her EOS R5 out for a spin on the streets of New York to do a night time fashion shoot to see just how well it handles.

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Three reasons to embrace hard light in your portraits

Many photographers prefer shooting portraits with soft light than hard light. There’s certainly a good reason for it: it’s more flattering on the subject, more forgiving, and requires less retouching. But does it mean you should discard the hard light? Absolutely not! Even though it can be more demanding to work with, there are reasons to love hard light and embrace it in portrait photography. In this video, Lindsay Adler shares three main reasons why you should do so.

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How to use V-flats to create three different beauty lighting setups

When shooting in a studio, you can use V-flats in a variety of ways. In this video, Lindsay Adler  shows you three simple setups you can create for beauty photography using V-flats. Each of them requires subtle changes in the setup, yet they’ll all give you drastically different results.

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Tips for shooting boudoir with only natural light

From a lighting standpoint, I find boudoir is one of the most fun genres to shoot. I feel it just offers more lighting choices than most other genres. Boudoir lighting can tell the same story many different ways. I often prefer flash for my own work. It just gives me more control. But I don’t always neglect the power of a big window light.

That’s what New York based fashion & beauty photographer and Canon Explorer of Light Lindsay Adler is doing in this video. She’s teamed up with ExpoImaging to produce a series of videos highlighting their Rogue range of photography accessories. Shooting by window light, Lindsay walks us through the process, offering a number of great posing and lighting tips along the way. There may be some NSFW viewing if you carry on.

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How to create dramatic short-light boudoir with just a single speedlight (NSFW)

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When you think of the popular boudoir photographers out there at the moment, Lindsay Adler’s name is one of those that immediately springs to mind, and for good reason. Her work’s fantastic.

In this video, Lindsay goes through her thought process when lighting a boudoir set in the studio, and demonstrates that you really don’t need a lot of equipment to get amazing results.

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The Secret, Misery And Bliss Of Finding Your Signature Photographic Style

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Lindsay Adler is a New York Based photographer, author, educator, all round glamorous pro photographer celebrity and social influencer. Lindsay kindly penned this brilliant guide on how to find your own signature style and why it really is a critical part of being a successful professional photographer…

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Learn The Three Basic Principles Of Light In Less Than 5 Minutes

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It’s hard to make it any more simple than the way Lindsay Adler breaks down the basic principles of light in this quick YouTube clip she made in collaboration with CreativeLive. Join the professional photographer as she discusses three of the most fundamental aspects of lighting: direction, quality, and intensity.

Obviously, you can’t learn everything there is to know about light in a sub 5-minute clip, but Adler does a great job of explaining the important stuff, which should give you some new tools to use when you’re out there practicing your craft. At the very least, it will get your wheels turning and provide some inspiration for experimentation.[Read More…]

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