The Flash Photography Field Guide

Cross Lighting

Setting up flashes quickly and getting everything to work fast is often a key requisite of photography. It’s great if you can spend ages measuring, moving, and tweaking your lighting setup, but more often than not time is of the essence. In addition, the more time you spend playing with and altering your lights, the less genuine interaction you will have with your subject—and getting the best out of your subject is really the secret to a great picture.

It’s good practice to work out a simple go-to formula for taking a successful picture pretty fast. After that, you can move on to more creative options.

My most-used setup is to use a cross-lighting technique, where there are two lights on the subject that are set up as the main ...