High Light - Low Ceiling | Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey

Gavin Hoey

Gavin Hoey is a freelance photographer, writer and trainer of all things photographic. His work is regularly featured in photography magazines, websites and videos.
Gavin has a real passion for sharing his photography and Photoshop knowledge. In 2008 he started recording and uploading video tutorials to YouTube. These quickly gained a large following and to date his videos have been viewed over 20 million times.
In 2010 Gavin was the winner of Adobe’s “Next Photoshop Evangelist” competition and since then he has given training demonstrations in Photoshop, Lightroom and Photoshop Elements in the UK, Europe and the US.
In 2012 Gavin joined forces with Adorama as a presenter on Adorama TV, where he inspires and teaches photographers from around the world in the art of photography and post processing.

One of the most limiting factors of working in a home portrait studio is the height of the ceiling. It can make it challenging to get a light up as high as you’d like and make it virtually impossible to fly a softbox above your model.

Luckily photographer Gavin Hoey has got years of experience working in a small home studio and shares three top ways to fit a model under a softbox and keep the whole set-up below an 8 foot (2.4 meters) high ceiling.

Starting by sitting his model on a low seat for beauty lighting, Gavin switches to a shallow softbox and a smaller Flashpoint XPLOR300 flash for a half-length shot. For an evenly lit, full-length portrait Gavin’s trick is to maximize the distance between this large Glow strip box and model the only way he can!

Interested in learning more about lighting and lighting setups? Check out these guides on 42 West:

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