Combining Broad and Narrow Lighting in Portrait Photography
A quick thought here, because we’re photographing Abby in a fairly tight frame and not really thinking about moving her body. But if you want to combine the two lighting patterns – and this applies whether you’re doing fairy light portrait photography, festive portrait photography ideas, or a straightforward studio session – what you can do is move the body around so that you’re lighting different parts of it in different ways. It’s a really useful technique, and once you start seeing it, you’ll find yourself using it constantly.
How to Light Face and Body Differently With One Source
You don’t have to light the face and the figure with exactly the same lighting pattern. Think of the body as two separate subjects that just happen to be connected. If I turn my body one way, I’m creating a different look onto my shoulder. If I then move my face the other way, I’ve got narrow lighting on my shoulder and broad lighting on my face. But if I want narrow lighting on my face instead, I simply bring the face – or the subject’s face – back across the shoulder slightly.
Using Posing to Change the Lighting Pattern
A practical example of why this matters: say you’re photographing someone with broader shoulders and you want to slim that part of the frame. You’d angle the body away from the light to create narrow lighting across the torso, which naturally reduces how wide it reads in camera. But perhaps the face looks better with a little more light and openness to it, so you bring the chin slightly forward and across to pull it into broad lighting. Same single light source. Two completely different effects on two different parts of the same person.
How to Use Clamshell Lighting Alongside This Approach
You can combine lighting patterns like that all the time – and if you’re exploring how to use clamshell lighting, this same principle applies beautifully. The clamshell setup wraps light around the face in a very open, flattering way, but you can still angle the body away from that source to introduce narrow lighting across the shoulders and torso. You just have to read different parts of a person’s body in different ways and then light them appropriately. It’s a bit like posing, really – you’re making small, considered adjustments rather than one big sweeping change. It doesn’t mean you have to have two lights. It just means you have to think in two halves.
Thinking in Two Halves for More Creative Control
And that shift in thinking is genuinely quite freeing. Once you stop trying to find one lighting position that works for the whole person, and start treating the face and the body as separate problems to solve, you have so much more creative control – all from exactly where your single light is already sitting. That’s true whether you’re working with a simple studio strobe, experimenting with slow sync flash portrait techniques, or even playing with long exposure flash photography to add something a little more atmospheric to the frame.