This was a fun, quick little color study with Erin Hurt, who did her own hair, makeup, and wardrobe styling. I wanted to focus on color and silhouette, so I had her select items with interesting shapes, like suit jacket or an A-line dress. To achieve this type of lighting I used my favorite lighting modifier, which is an 8-inch, DIY snoot. I placed two strips of gaff tape over the opening, leaving a quarter-inch opening in the center, and positioned the flash so that the light strip fell vertically down the center of the model. I set up a background flash on the ground behind her, aiming into the white sweep.

Regarding colors I started with my favorite combination of cyan and red. After shooting a set with the main light red and background cyan, I swapped out the gels to have cyan on my main and red on the background. I did the same thing for the next two setups, only this time using yellow and blue as the two colors.

Once I got the files into Lightroom I gave the images a high contrast treatment with matte shadows and film grain to give them a vintage 80s look.

This technique and may other creative portrait setups will be covered in my upcoming book, The Creative Portrait, which is now available to pre-order on Amazon.

Finally, a big thanks to Feedspot for including me in their list of top 100 photo blogs and to you for reading my posts and making this possible!