Portable Lighting - Thursday, October 16, 2008 20:02 - 0 Comments

“Why did you light it that way?”

A friend and fellow photographer and I were sitting and having some overpriced coffee when he asked me a question about one of my shots that we were looking at. “Why did you light it that way?”

It took me a bit by surprise because most of the time I am asked “how” not why. I mentioned a post at Flickr I had made earlier about asking why instead of how, but he insists he doesn’t do forum stuff on the internet (and I believe him) so it was unrelated.

And I was off guard.

The shot was one I posted a while back and I had to make some decisions about how to do it and what tools I would use to do it. It is a shot of Briana taken on the Mexico trip and with the look of a candid.

I had nearly anything I would have wanted at my disposal… great house for a set, studio lights, soft boxes.. you name it.

But I wanted the shot to look natural and without the ‘hand of the photographer’ in the image.

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