Traditional Lighting Patterns
The three basic lighting patterns for a portrait are known as Rembrandt, loop, and butterfly lighting. In these shots of a model in front of a white wall, only one flash was used. It was, fitted with a large white shoot-through umbrella to soften the light.
As the room was painted white, the light from the umbrella bounced around the walls and ceiling and filled in a lot of the shadows, and a reflector positioned under the model filled in some more. All that was moved in each photo was the position of the main light.
The first look is the classic Rembrandt style, as seen in many of the paintings by the great master artist. In his work, Rembrandt used soft window light from a north-facing window. In our shot we used ...
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