Stripbox Gives Glamourous Portrait

This tutorial shows how to use a very narrow softbox, called strip box to create glamorous images of your models in a studio setup. Strip boxes, being slim, can direct the light the way you want. A panel reflector is also used to fill in the shadows, and the model is photographed on the white background, close to the wall.

If you experiment with your hand by placing it in front of a strip box, you will notice how the shadows and light are changing when you are moving your head to and from the center of the strip box. So you should use the light from the soft box to stress the volume (shadows) of your model and not to make her look flat.

How to Achieve Perfect Exposure

This video lesson shows what the right histogram should look like in a perfect exposure setting. You do not want the date in your histogram to extend to either boundary (to have no clipping on the left or right). The general rule is to shift the histogram to the right a bit (as close to the highlights as possible but without going over). You will see a series of photographs illustrating how exposure is related to the histogram.

Studio Lighting Adjusted for Model

Adam Bonilla explains and shows how you should adjust your lighting setup according to your model's face and figure. Some photographers prefer using just one setup that they have learned and it may not suit every model.

Models' faces are different, some have more oval or wider faces and you need to take this into consideration. He shows one model with an oval face for whom he chooses top lighting, so called a butterfly scheme.

If you need to separate your blond model from the background in post processing, the only way to do it is using dark background in your studio.