So now we're coming to Rembrandt lighting. Now, a lot of people mix Rembrandt lighting up with open loop and closed loop lighting, particularly closed loop lighting, they will show you Rembrandt, what they think is Rembrandt and actually showing you close loop, there is quite a strong difference. So let's go and have a look at that and see how we would set up Rembrandt lighting on what it looks like on the subject. Now at first glance, this actually looks like closed loop lighting, and it froze a lot of people and they do mix the two up like I just mentioned earlier. But what's the difference with closed loop lighting and Rembrandt? Well, it's about the height of the speed light, and we'll go through that in a moment or the height of your flash or your light source.

But let's just understand where this idea of Rembrandt lighting comes from apparently Rembrandt had the studio with a small light in the roof in the ceiling. And he would use that light as it fell on the subjects he noticed that found it quite pleasing. And therefore it became part of his painting. And it is now known as Rembrandt lighting. Now that's how the story goes. I don't know how true it is.

But let's go and have a look how we create this very dramatic, very dramatic dark start and I want you to note I've shot this on a black background, because I want to create the full drama The way it would have been used by Rembrandt. So when viewed from above, this is exactly the same as a closed loop lighting pattern again, we use a small flash. So you can see how this lighting works, but it's when we actually come down. Let's go down into virtual studio. Look at the height of that light. We have basically places that the same height as we would with the beauty lighting.

And it's amazing how you start to see the patterns after a while, how you start to see how things match. And you know, how does only a certain number of positions like 90 degrees, 45 degrees, there's the height, which is I and then we go up and double height and have a 45 degree down is one set of different settings and positions of lights and cameras and the subject. And then we're just changing them around to create all these different patterns. Now, that's not the best way to think of them in terms of learning. What you want to do is learn Rembrandt, practice that, learn split lighting, practice that and after a little while, you'll start seeing that there are just combinations of a few standard light positions and face positions. So that's what we've got here.

We've got a very high light and that's how we get This really dramatic look. And then when we look at the shadow under the chin, we can see the lights telling us which direction is falling in. So typically we can shoot like this with one light, it's very powerful, very dramatic. Very good if you've got a female subject who's got some Angular features to their face, or a male with Angular features. This in fact will work for lots of different face types. And it's also can be quite slimming on the face as well because of the heavy shadow on the right hand side.

But before we leave this, let's have a look at what happens when we add some fill light. So what we've done here is we've added some fill light and I've added quite a bit of fill on here so you can see what it looks like when you just open the face up a bit. Now, obviously you can see the harsh shadow, I probably would not use a speed light on this I'd probably soften that a little bit of an umbrella normally on the main it's just helps you to see You got this hard shadow running under the chin, which I'd probably soften a little bit. But if you just look at the face now, we've got some really nice light here. And we've still got the strong definition. And we still got a loop here.

But now we've got this Rembrandt loop rather than the closed loop, and it tends to be a little bit more deep. Now the other thing about this lighting is it does dark in the eyes. So it's very hard to get a highlight in the eye with this, but then adds to the mystery and to the intensity in the mood of this type of lighting. So let's have a look. See what that looks like in the studio. So as you can see, in this instance, what I've gone for here is a fill of 45 degrees.

Now, the reason I've gone 45 degrees is because I do want to get a little bit of wrap around the nose in this shot. So I'd recommend this as a standard and then you could always move forward Feel to 90 degrees for the subject if you just wanted to maybe bring the fill down a little bit. Now here's something I've done a little bit more interesting on this one is I've got my umbrella at the same height as the speed light. If I wanted to soften that shadow under the chin, I would bring my fill light, which is a speed light shooting into the umbrella I bring that down. And our position that just above the subjects head as we would normally with a main life was using open loop closed loop lighting. So let me just show you quickly so you can understand what I'm saying here.

Typically, I would move this light to about here and that would create a little bit of softer shadow under the chin It's not quite dramatic, maybe a little bit softer, a little bit more pleasing. But what I want to do here on this last one, I just want to change the modifier to show you how Rembrandt changes when we add a diffuser, which is going to make the light source a little bit bigger. So now what I've got here, rather than straight flash up, put an umbrella around because I want to soften the light. Let's just bring that up. And we can see now that's much softer. And I just wanted to show you that to help you to understand that what I've been sharing is a very harsh light.

But when we start softening the lights, you start to get some really beautiful images, you start to get some really beautiful lighting. Now this now has become really soft and quite pleasing. But you might actually prefer to have a harsh You might be creating strong mood. So the Rembrandt lighting and all the other lighting patterns by changing the modifier from a hard to a soft light source is going to create amazing variation. So when you think about it, you've got so many different ways you can use each lighting. Remember the main light is fixed, but the fill light we can change and move.

But the modifier on the main light can be changed or removed to create different looks. But the best thing to do is to set up get a subject and then play with all the different lighting