Profoto B10x Painting with Light | Inside Fashion and Beauty Photography with Lindsay Adler

Lindsay Adler

Lindsay Adler is a fashion photographer, educator, and author based in New York City. You can follow her work and see her photography on her website, lindsayadlerphotography.com, or on Instagram @lindsayadler_photo.

Painting with light is an extraordinarily fun photographic technique… it feels like magic as you actually can ‘brush stroke’ your light into the scene. But what is painting with light? This is when you use a long exposure (usually several seconds) and then use a light source to selectively illuminate your shot. This can be achieved with a flashlight, LED penlight, laser, or even the light from your phone!

One of the masters of painting with light is the incredible fashion photographer Paolo Roversi. I am not only in love with his photographic techniques but also the way he selects and styles his beautiful models. This shoot is very much inspired by Roversi, and even though I don’t exactly know how he does his personal beauty techniques, I want to share some fundamentals of painting with light!

1. Eliminate Ambient Light

You need to get rid of any ambient light in the room. Turn off overhead lights, close the window, even turn your laptop away from the subject. Because you will be using very long exposure you need to get rid of any light the could possibly contaminate your shot.

2. Shoot on A Tripod

You will likely be shooting an exposure of several seconds, and you absolutely cannot hand-hold for this technique. Use a strong, stable tripod.

3. Use Manual or Bulb Exposure

To achieve a long exposure you will need to set your camera to manual (and select the length of time) or bulb. Bulb exposure means that as long as you press the trigger the shutter will be open. You can even use a cable release if you want to exposure to be many minutes in length!

For this shoot, I used a Profoto B10x to paint my scene. Why that over a flashlight?

Do you need a $2000 strobe to paint with light? No. You can use a $5 flashlight. I get that? But what is the benefit of using a brighter constant light like the B10X?

The B10x model light is bicolor, so I can adjust the white balance of the constant light to suit the needs of my shoot.

Next, the B10x mode light is VERY bright (30% brighter than the B10). Why does that matter? This is very helpful when shooting long exposures and being able to overpower the ambient light. If there is ambient light in a space and I need to shoot high ISO and wide aperture, then it is likely that even the light from a distant window or even your laptop will register! If, however, I am working with a brighter light source I can shoot at camera settings that allow me to eliminate ambient light (in this example ISO 100, 8 sec, F16).

On my light source, I used a grid to concentrate the light as well as cinefoil is a black tin foil that allows me to control the spread of light. I used a narrow opening in the cinefoil to create tiny brush strobes to selectively light both the subject and background.

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