Real moody shots are not easy

But so much fun

To be honest, the higher the level of difficulty the more fun a photoshoot can be.
When working with high contrast lighting and focussed light sources it can be very easy to fall into the trap of not having enough light on your subject/set.

Let’s take a quick look at some of the solutions.

Bounce
An easy solution to just grab a large softbox (or bounce from the ceiling) and set this 3-4 stops lower than your main light and open up the shadows.
You could also try to do it in Photoshop or Lightroom with the shadows slider.
If you use fill in lights you will also take away some of the magic that a high contrast image has.
However it’s a technique that sometimes is necessary, especially when a model is wearing dark clothes.

Accent lights
The first thing I always try is to solve it with accent lights.
For me the perfect accent lights are small strips with grids.

These are perfect to focus the light on one area and the grid prevents spill light.
The reason strips work great is that they are relatively small so you can place them close by, limiting the spread of light.
But you can also use them in both vertical als horizontal position (and everything in between).
And I often use them as main lightsource if a small softbox just doesn’t have enough “reach”.
Because the striplight is a rectangle you can light a wider area without spilling over to the sides like with a standard softbox.
Sometimes just changing a small softbox for a slightly longer striplight can solve the whole problem, and light the whole subject just the way you want.

Smoke
Another option is using smoke.
Smoke is a diffuser, reflector and mood maker.
And you know the most fun….. combining everything together.

So the next time you want to use high contrast lighting and you want to make certain details jump out, try the striplight.
In this video I show you one of the ways to light up details in a very dark shot, for super moody results.