In this week’s Framed episode of Lit Up, Joel Grimes takes us on another 3 light setup that he uses, although this time, it is for beauty lighting. Whereas he uses his signature 3-lights edgy lighting for his sports subject to create a strong, gritty look, with 3-lights beauty lighting, Joel wants to create a softer glowing look with a more porcelain-like smooth skin. The edge lights are still there, but the falloff are a lot more gradual and less prominent. He also adds a white bounce from below to fill in the shadows and soften the skin even more.





Joel also talks about the importance in experimenting with different light ratios and modifiers in order to start seeing what kind of lighting style that would suit you best. I believe that as a photographer, you want to constantly test out different lighting techniques just so you can have more ideas to pull out of your back pocket. I remember that when I started out shooting with off-camera flash last year, I had one speedlight and an umbrella, and I had no idea what I was doing. Nowadays, I can use 3-5 strobe lights with 3-5 different modifiers and I continue to try new techniques. That’s why I love Joel’s videos. I’m constantly learning.

In the video, he demonstrated with both the beauty dish with a front sock and a large octabox at different power levels, and with and without the white bounce fill card.


Here is the beauty dish with the fill bounce:

Without the fill bounce:

Key light half stop up:

Key light one stop down:

Related posts:

1. [Framed] Joel Grimes on Overhead Beauty Lighting
2. [Framed] Joel Grimes on Softer Edge Sports Lighting
3. [Framed] Joel Grimes on His Signature 3-Lights Edgy Lighting
4. On Lighting: Joel Grimes & Rembrandt Cross Lighting
5. [Framed] Joel Grimes on Broad Overhead Light