Same light but different

Now on a lot of sites you see lighting diagrams, and sometimes people also ask me about it.
The problem with diagrams is that they do help to get in the ballpark, but what a lot of people don’t realize is that by changing the models pose or just moving the strobes a few inches can have a HUGE impact on the final result. Today a sample of this.

For the following shots I used the exact same setup.
The only difference is that for the first one we angled the strobe on the right side of the image (the accent light) just a little bit away from the model.
For the second shot the model actually took about 1 step backwards and as you can see…. the difference is huge, but in a diagram the difference would be very very minim.

So the next time you struggle with getting the results you see in a book by following the diagram make sure that you realize that if the effect is not the same as the sample shot that sometimes just a small step forwards or backwards, or even a slightly different angle of the light can make a huge difference. So don’t panic if it doesn’t work out the first time 😀