As you may know by now, NYC fashion and portrait photographer Jeff Rojas is all about keeping shoots simple and teaching you to do the same. In a new instructional video for Adorama TV, he’s brought out Westcott’s portable Rapid Box Beauty Dish to demonstrate three techniques that can help you step up your lighting game.

First, a butterfly lighting setup, so named for the butterfly shaped shadow this lighting creates beneath the nose. Jeff shows us three potential ways to use this setup – without diffusion, giving crisper shadows, with diffusion, softening things up, and with a Rogue Super Soft Silver reflector beneath the subject filling in shadows from below for a clamshell effect, which is the setup he chooses for his final image

[REWIND] KEEP IT SIMPLE | ONE LIGHT PORTRAIT TUTORIAL WITH JEFF ROJAS

Second, Jeff achieves Rembrandt lighting by placing the beauty dish at 45 degrees to the subject on camera left, while there is a mirror in the room bouncing light back. This adds a catchlight to the subject’s eye that is farther from the light and throws some light back on the background, giving separation.

Last is a painterly effect achieved by feathering the diffused beauty dish. The light is placed above the subject with the near edge pointed at his right shoulder (camera left.) It’s also pulled back far enough to allow enough spill onto the backdrop for separation.

See Jeff Rojas demonstrate all the techniques in the 5-minute video below.

via iso1200