This article is part of the ‘Portrait Lighting For Beginners’ series. This series is meant to help you go from a beginning photographer to making beautiful portraits.

Image by johnlewis1513

Your first question right now is probably, “What the heck are these terms?” That’s understandable, especially if you’re new to portrait photography. So I’ll start this lesson by explaining what these poses are.

• Seven eighths view – This is a view of the subject that shows seven eighths of the subject’s face. Basically, this is a dead on view but with the face turned just slightly to one side.
• Three quarters view – This view shows three quarters of the subject’s face. Her face is turned 45 degrees from the camera and the far ear disappears from view.
• Two thirds view – This is probably the most commonly used facial position in portraiture. This is simply a position between seven eighths and three quarters. It provides for a nice comfortable pose without looking forced.

Lighting The Two Thirds And Three Quarters Views

This article isn’t just about telling you what these poses are. This is about telling you the best way to light them! Remember part six of this series on 45 degree lighting? If not, you might want to take a quick moment to go back and refresh your memory, because we’ll be using that idea again here.

Totally off topic, but kind of entertaining. Today I saw a link and some traffic start to come in from Swedish site Bild och foto. I’ve also seen a lot of traffic come in from Digicamera.net, a photography site in Finland. Both sites were pointing visitors to yesterday’s article on whether the light from our flashes will damage young babies’ eyes.

Being American and only speaking English and pretty rusty Spanish, I had no clue what the Swedes were saying about Sublime Light. My curiosity got the better of me so I decided to run the Swedish text through an online translator. While I got the gist of what was being said, the results were a little entertaining:

Indeed able husband trouble themselves if lightning able harm eye. If yous moreover is parent is husband enormously concerned about sits baby and indeed able disturbs husband themselves in unnecessary. Sublime Light am typing and clear with link to various source as clear fair that blixtljuset is safe. For that ögat ska kunna harm asserted high focus intensely light wonder a inferior term. Blixtljuset is mess and wonder a almighty short term so feel yourself quiet that shoot eras baby also with flash.

Computer translation ready for prime time? Uh…maybe next year.

Oh, and welcome to all our new Swedish and Finnish friends!

My son at 4 weeks

Just about anyone who is good with a camera will eventually be asked to take photos of someone’s baby. If you’re a new parent, you probably take lots and lots of pictures of your new baby. In the first year of my son’s life, my wife and I took somewhere around ten thousand pictures of him. Many were portraits with lots of strobe use. This begs the question:

Can bright bursts of flash damage young babies’ developing eyes?

I’ve heard this before, and this topic came up a couple of weeks ago in the comments on my initial review of the Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens. Big thanks to Scott Hampton and Michael Deeter for getting the ball rolling on this one.

I’ve always operated under the assumption that flash bursts don’t do any damage to human eyes, even babies. But I thought this was an excellent opportunity to do a little digging and get some facts. Here’s what I found.

Ah yes, another week has flown by and it’s Saturday again, which means it’s time for another round of cool stuff I found on the webernet this week. I thought I’d do something a little bit different this week and branch out a tad. So this weeks links aren’t 100% directly related to portrait photography, but still good reads.

• You don’t need a freakin light meter! – Is any explanation necessary?
• How to Create Glamour Model Photography – There are some really great tips in here for those of you who might want to dip your toes into glamour photography. There are also some great tips for everyone else in here too, even if glamour isn’t your thing.
• 11 Free Photo Editors At Your Choice – Let’s face it, Photoshop is expensive. So here are some really great alternatives for those of you who want to spend more on your camera than on the software.
• Get Down Low to Frame Out Ugly Backgrounds – I live in Austin, so there are no ugly backgrounds to be found. Yeah right, ugly backgrounds can be found anywhere. Here’s a technique for getting rid of it without any post processing work.
• Overcoming Shyness in Photographing People – For most people, photographing strangers on the street is a nerve wracking experience. Read this article and you might feel a little better about it.
• 5 Things Photographers Should Do When Confronted by Police – Many photographers have been confronted by police for simply taking pictures. It’s happened to me and I can tell you from personal experience that these tips are sure fire winners.

Reader Photo Highlights

Wow, the Sublime Light Flickr photo pool really went nuts this week. There are way too many great photos for me to highlight here this week, so I’m going to have to just pick a few. If you haven’t joined in yet, get crackin!

This article is part of the ‘Portrait Lighting For Beginners’ series. This series is meant to help you go from a beginning photographer to making beautiful portraits.

Split lighting.
Clicky for larger

We continue our series on basic lighting setups with split lighting. Split lighting is simply lighting half of the subject’s face, while leaving the other half in complete shadow. This form of lighting creates a sense of drama in a portrait and really adds a little variety to a portfolio of images. While this isn’t my favorite of lighting setups, I do break it out from time to time to see what I’ll get. You can see here that even with a baby, you can create quite a mood with this type of lighting.

The image at left is another of my (then five month old) son. If you read the last section in this series on Profile Lighting, I told you that I caught my son in profile by mistake. This split lit shot was actually the shot I was going for when his little bobble head swung off in one direction to pay attention to God knows what, probably the cat.

Here’s how to set up a split lit shot.