I blogged about a portrait & studio lighting class I’m teaching for UTM Space Executive Diploma in Creative Photography and Digital Imaging here. The first class was held a fortnight ago over 2 day period in my Barebone Studio in Saujana Impian, Kajang. For a taste of what location shoot feels like, I made them attend, nay,  organised an outing in a popular “secret location” in Subang.

A simple lighting set-up of one main light and one hair/keylight is all we need. A high-ish shutter speed than normal meter reading will render the background ambient light darker.

Wanna see how the result looks like?

In this outing the students learns how using artificial light source, in this case a set of studio strobes, one can change the look and feel (some would prefer to use the word “mood”. Can oso what) of the photo and  how it affect one’s visual narrative. More importantly, they learnt to differentiate between a “snapshot” and a photograph.

I shot a few variations of the above photos with and without eye contact (the more pedantic amongst you will shurely remember about my blog post about eye contact. Well, at least I think I DID blog about the eye contact bit when shooting portraits heh heh heh). Some of the images will be used for future class materials and at least one image will be featured in the lighting book (in Bahasa Melayu, in case one is wandering lah) that I am currently writing the 1st draft.

We took a group photo (for posterity) in Barebone Studio yesterday when they come in to hand in their assignments.

Oh, here’s a link lah to downoad a bigger file.

I have a series of portraits made when there’s drama in the sky, and I hope the sky compliments the “mood” of the image above. I like most of them, especially the one where I do not to strip in any clouds, as all are done in camera, just like the above picture lah.

I hope you like it too *winks*