Portraiture isn’t just photographing pretty girls, so for the final class I booked Jake from Superior Models.

Previously we’ve shot with charcoal and white paper backgrounds – today we used the studio wall. A bare wall is remarkably versatile and has the advantage that the subject can lean against it (unlike a paper or vinyl background).

To make the bare wall a little bit more interesting, it was lit using a strobe with a small dish and honeycomb grid to create a pool of light.

Today’s was the last class of this course. It’s impossible to teach everything in such a short course – we’ve concentrated primarily in head and shoulder shots (with an occasional diversion when time permitted). My main objective was to give the participants confidence and a general grounding in the basic lighting techniques. However, like all skills, these now require repeated practice for each participant to refine them in their own way.

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