16 Jan Creating Beautiful Portraiture with Rembrandt Lighting
There are some elements you can control in your portrait: clothing, accessories, hair, and makeup, to name a few. The rest comes down to the photographer. Beautiful portraiture is not determined by the most expensive camera or the fanciest background; beautiful portraiture is determined by technical skill. This puts an enormous amount of pressure on the photographer, but a pro can handle it. There’s nothing like a good creative challenge.
One skill a professional photographer cannot live without is understanding lighting. Proper lighting is essential in photography, especially portraiture. Patrick Keating writes, “Depth is not captured by the mechanical camera; it is created by the individual photographer, through the skillful manipulation of light and shade. Likeness is created, not captured.” Or, as John Coyle says, “If a photographer knows how to light, then it is a homerun.”
There are a few popular portrait lighting styles. Butterfly lighting is a style where the light creates a shadow under the subject’s nose that resembles a butterfly. This is frequently seen in Hollywood portraits. Ring lighting is flat, soft, and fills in shadows on the subject’s face. This is common in fashion photography, Zoom meetings, and makeup application videos. Both styles have their place in portraiture, but they are not as universally flattering as a style known as Rembrandt lighting.
What is Rembrandt Lighting?
The term “Rembrandt Lighting” is named after Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), a Dutch Baroque master painter. Rembrandt was an amazing visual storyteller. His paintings and other works are famous for their realism and interplay between light and shadow. Keating notes, “If Rembrandt were merely a virtuoso with light and shade, he would be a minor figure. Traditionally, what makes Rembrandt a great master is his legendary ability to peer into the souls of his subjects.”
“Man with a Magnifying Glass” by Rembrandt, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437399
In his biography of Rembrandt, Christopher White describes his technique further:
The pattern of shadows was broken up so that instead of the simple contrast between one half of the face in light and the other in shadow, light and shadow alternate in numerous small areas of varying intensity over the entire face. Above all, the most subtle gradations of shadow are applied to the area around the eyes, which in the later portraits immediately capture the attention, and lead the spectator on with the sensation that through the eyes can be read the mind of the person represented.
Photographers and cinematographers latched onto Rembrandt’s fame and skill to try to elevate their professions into art forms. Keating notes, “Photographers and their peers in cinematography, struggling as they were to justify their work as art, used the ‘Rembrandt’ tag to render artful their manipulation of light.” This worked to some degree in the early 1900s, but it sparked a debate that went well into the 1950’s. In his 1953 lecture to the Royal Photographic Society, Sir Kenneth Clark argued that:
…whether or not photography is an art, it is emphatically not a craft. A craft, I take it, is a kind of making in which mastery of technique is so difficult and so important that it becomes almost an end in itself: skill generates its own creative fervor, independent of the idea. A craft exists in the act. In photography the act consists in pressing a button.”
This is an absurd statement. While there are photographers who just press a button and hope for the best, any professional who truly understands lighting is an artist and a craftsman like Rembrandt. For instance, John has been called “a mad scientist” because of his dedication to and mastery of lighting. For today’s master photographers, it’s not a stretch to say they paint with light. They create artistic highlights and shadows through lighting–not the camera. A camera is only as good as the photographer using it; a photo is only as good as the effort they put into lighting and composition.
Rembrandt Lighting and Modern Portraits
Photographers use Rembrandt lighting to add depth to their portraiture. They create a triangle–also known as a “Rembrandt Triangle”–of light that spreads under the subject’s eye and extends under the nose toward the mouth. This triangle guarantees that the image looks three-dimensional and demonstrates depth. The contrast between light and shadow can be moody and dramatic or soft and bright depending on the person or the purpose. When compared to butterfly lighting or ring lighting, Rembrandt lighting is universally flattering and creates a nice slimming effect without relying on extensive post-production.
This technique requires a little more effort than other lighting styles. The photographer needs to tweak the lighting for each person to properly light their face and position the subject properly to create an accurate likeness. The best part about Rembrandt lighting is that it doesn’t require any extra effort from you. Some lighting styles require you to wear additional makeup or products to prevent you from looking washed out or flat. With Rembrandt lighting, you can show up for your portrait in your everyday look and still have a beautiful portrait that resembles you.
Want to learn more about portraiture? Check out our article, “Photography Myth: I’m Not Photogenic.”