In this video, photographer Jay P. Morgan from the Slanted Lens looks at how to use a soft box to feather light in order to get a nicer more focused look of your subject.
Feathering light is an old and very popular technique for controlling the light in your image. The concept is very simple – using your softbox you can shape the light by tilting and movig it so that only part of the scene is lit. In this way you can avoid lighting up areas of the frame that you do not want to emphasize like the grass in the first part of Morgan’s video or the background of the model in the second part of the video.
Morgan’s main advice here is to use the softbox up and towards the camera (instead of downwards for example where you would typically light a lot of the background). The advantage here is that you focus the viewer on your subject and take away focus from the background/environment.
It is highly recommend that you watch Morgan’s “Soft Boxes 101” which is in our view one of the most informative videos on the subject that you can find online.
You can find lot more lighting tutorials on our photography lighting section here on LensVid, and you can find all of Jay P. Morgan’s videos here on LensVid on the following link.