Portrait photography tip: use a window as raking light

Saturday 29 August 2020, 15:30 by Elja Trum | 4,431 views | 0 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

Raking light works very well for portrait photography. It skims across your model from a light source, such as a window. This creates a rim of light along the body while the rest remains dark.

f/2, 1/500th, 320 ISO @ 85mm
You do this by placing the light source behind your model. The angle between the light source, your model and your camera determines how much light skims across your model. So you can experiment with this to achieve the desired effect.

With raking light, the front of your model becomes dark, but you can use this to your advantage. Have the model look to the side, or light the face with a reflector if you do not want it to disappear into the darkness.

Instead of a reflector, you can of course also use a small lamp or flash. You can often also recover a lot of detail from the dark areas during post-processing, as I did with the model's face in the photo in this article.

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