Hard and soft light

Hard and soft light

One of the things I find I have to keep fighting on workshops is photographers’ love of soft light. Yes, soft light is often lovely, and very flattering, but it’s so boring after a while…

You can simply run across lovely light (of either type) but the challenge is to create the effects for yourself. Here’s a relatively-simple way to get both kinds of light at home, with cheap equipment, or using domestic light sources. The first workshop I ever ran on my own account was about using IKEA lights with models…



I apologise for the lack of finesse in the backgrounds, and the lack of sex appeal in the model. Options are limited during lockdown. I shot self-portraits with a Serious Readers lamp (top) and an IKEA Duderö (immediately above) , which uses two LED lamps inside a wire and tissue diffuser. With either source, moving the light backwards and forwards in relation to the subject changes where the shadows are, and can do so radically when the light is focussed, or close in. A larger light source is more forgiving.



It’s important to turn off other light sources, and draw the curtains if you’re shooting during the day.



I repeated the exercise with a small Elinchrom unit, with a small softbox and a reflector with a honeycomb grid: model’s eye views of these are attached. Note that even with the softbox, if you position it so that it’s aimed past the subject you’ll get quite definitely and dramatic lighting. The key is to experiment, and to try moving the lights a bit at a time.


I’ve recently suggested that lighting diagrams can be useful for understanding things. Now, I can’t construct these in Photoshop, so I may end up photographing sketches, because it’s hard to get sufficient clarity in a photograph. (Note: I take photographs because I can’t draw…)

In the pictures above I was sitting right up against the background, which means that there are shadows on the background. One solution is to use a separate light for the background. But a better idea is to separate your subject from the background, so that whatever is behind the subject goes dark, like this:



Note that using a softer light source makes this harder to do, and you either need to aim more carefully, or to increase the separation from the background. It’s around a metre for these shots.