One of my favorite lighting styles is dramatic lighting or artistic nude lighting.

If you’re a frequent visitor to the blog, you know that full nude glamour isn’t really my thing. I do it for submissions, but not really my thing. When I do shoot full nudes, I prefer it to be done “artistically” to give a bit of mystique to the shot. Today I’m going to show what a one maybe two lights and a few budget conscience modifiers can do for ya!

First up the One light with a 12×36 strip softbox and 20degree grid

The resulting images above gives a very nice, moody lighting setup that has nice contrast and color. Nice specular high lights and a super simple setup to get the shot. I love this because it puts less time on the technical aspect and more time working with the client to get the best shot.

The second setup is a softbox with no grid and how it differs.

As you can see with this setup, the modifier has changed. How can you tell? Look at the amount of light not only hitting the model, but the fall off directly behind the model. This setup was done using a 4×6 softbox. As you look at the illustration photo you may see that the very end edge of the softbox is pointed at the model. This is NOT a mistake! Being we don’t have a grid or other modifier on the softbox, we don’t want all of the light hitting the model or we’ll end up with a nice Rembrandt photo. We want shadows and moody lighting. The image is further enhanced via post processing.

There are very few rules to photography so make sure you learn them, then break as many as you can. Once you know the rules you absoultely can’t break, you learn everything else is fair game!