Video Tutorials
How to Keep Dramatic Lighting Without Exposing Every Skin Texture
Every few months a client emails me something like: “I love your dramatic work, but I’m self-conscious about my skin — will that lighting make it worse?” It’s a fair question, and for a long time I didn’t have a clean answer. Hard light rakes across texture. Scars cast tiny shadows. Acne that looks invisible in a mirror can look like a topographical map under a bare strobe. I used to mentally file these shoots under “handle carefully” without a clear system for handling them.