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1| Portraits and all that jazz

Digital Camera UK

November 2022

Mix opposing coloured lighting effects for portrait and fashion shoots with punch, says Alistair Campbell

Colour is one of the main creative tools in photography, and coloured lighting allows you to experiment with colours in a variety of different ways. Whether you use tried and trusted techniques like placing coloured gel diffusers over flashguns, or LED light panels which offer millions of built-in colours at your fingertips. the corrective colour techniques we'll be looking at here will help you produce highly creative environmental scenes or editorialstyle fashion and portrait shots with punch.

One great way to get started is to use a pair of complementary colours. Blue and orange is a popular combination, for example, and can be seen in the teal and orange film look that's popular in Hollywood movies.

You don't have to stick to only complementary colours, though; let your imagination run wild and trust your intuition. As colour harmonies look pleasing to our eyes, you can rely on your intuition to instinctively pick colours that go well together.

If you want to know more about how colours work together, then research analogous, complementary, split complementary, triadic and tetradic harmonies. So let's get started on how to work with coloured lighting or gels.

1 Shoot differently Using coloured LED lights, or gel diffusers over a light source, means that you'll need to shoot in a different way. Flash lighting is powerful even when turned right down; you're likely to use a sync speed of around 1/160-1/200 sec, which lets plenty of light in. And continuous lighting allows you to open up your aperture for a far more shallow depth of field.