How To Create Beautiful Female Portraits
At the SWPP superclass Photographing Women for Profit, Bjorn Thomassen was keen to emphasis that beautiful female portraits can be created simply with only one light source. He is also keen on using black reflectors to help sculpt his subjects. This fits perfectly with the way I work for the majority of my photography.
Towards the end of the class he brought in a model to demonstrate how to create beautiful female portraits through lighting and posing.
Women will pay to have weight taken away
Bjorn says, “women will pay to have weight taken away”. There are many techniques that can help achieve this but I’ll focus on lighting and the removal of light.
Creating the correct lighting pattern is the key to slimming the appearance of your face, which is achieved with what is known as “short lighting”. Short lighting is created by having the subject effectively between the camera and the light source. The height and angle that the light hits your face completes the lighting pattern. With the side of the face facing towards the camera being in shade it reduces the width of the front of the face, as can be seen in an image below.
Removing light is achieved through black reflectors and having the light source as close to you as possible. Black reflectors absorb most of the light hitting them and deepen the shadows through being reflected on your skin de-emphasizing those areas. This works because the viewers eyes are naturally drawn to brighter parts of your picture. It also creates a 3-D world within a 2-D medium.
To help verify the final lighting pattern and pose, Bjorn’s tip is for the photographer to squint his/her eyes to exaggerate the contrast. This will help identify problems such as shadows under the eyes. So if you see me squinting at you – don’t worry, it’s all part of the process to ensure you look amazing!
Your Eyes
Whilst on the subject of how to create beautiful portraits. Did you know that the positioning of your eyes is very important?
You may not have noticed before. But when the subject’s face is posed looking away from the camera, a good portrait has the eyes looking in the same direction and NOT looking back towards the camera or even further way.
Think about it.
If your eyes are looking to one side it creates a large white area on the face. As the viewers eyes are drawn to brighter areas of the pictures, they’ll be drawn to the whites of your eyes. This doesn’t look elegant and stops the viewer from exploring the beautiful features of your face.
With your eyes placed centrally the viewer is drawn in to your irises and can literally see your inner beauty. The intricate patterns in your iris is stimulating to the viewer, which will cause them to survey the surrounding areas but keep returning to your eyes.
The next key is to place the iris on or just above your lower eyelid. Forcing you to open your eyes wide helps make your eyes bigger. And as you know larger eyes makes you more beautiful 
This is all controlled by the photographer.
Fifteen minutes to go
The superclass was almost at an end when we went down to a reserved hotel lobby. Bjorn regularly works in hotels and demonstrated how easy it is create wonderful lighting by simply bouncing one light off the ceiling.
He used a mobile flash unit but literally any light source could be used. To prove this he didn’t even attach a light reflector to his studio flash. By bouncing light off the ceiling we create a soft light as its being reflected off a large surface. To mix in some hard light, he allows some of the flash tube to be directly in line with his model.
Bjorn creates a very simple light set up in the hotel lobby
Beatiful pose set up by Bjorn. Notice how her irises are placed central and just above the lower eye lids. Also see how the shade falling on thd side of her cheek narrows the appearance of her face.
I asked her to look towards the camera to create this more dramatic image simply by changing the relationship between the light and her face. I would usually use "butterfly lighting" for this style of pose but she still looks very glamourous and sexy in this shot.
Pat
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