OnSet with Daniel Norton: Using shadows to accentuate and shape your subject’s face

 

 

Photographer and educator Daniel Norton has an ongoing video series, OnSet for Adorama and in his latest episode, he shows us how to harness the power of shadows to create dramatic black and white portraits.

Photographers spend a lot of time working with lights and modifiers to remove shadows, but there are times when you can utilize shadows to enhance your work. In the videos below, Norton is using the mirrorless medium-format Hasselblad X1D camera and Hasselblad 90mm f/3.2 XCD lens.

Back to the subject at hand, to create shapely and lovely shadows on a face, it's often good to utilize side lighting. As photographers, so often work hard to capture as many details as possible, so it can be difficult to let shadows fall over the subject and lose details you often would have wanted to capture. To learn how to use shadows to shape a portrait subject's face, watch Daniel's video below.

(Via Adorama)