The Power of Grids | How to Create Dramatic Lighting

While we’ve used a wedding-themed styled shoot to demonstrate this technique, you can use the grid technique to create dramatic lighting in most any area of portrait photography. A grid is a simple photography tool used to control light direction and minimize light spill when using a flash or strobe. To paraphrase Trevor Dayley of MagMod, if you hold a grid up to your eye, you can quickly see how it limits your field of view. Grids present an effective way to funnel light forward, and we recommend keeping one in your lighting kit at all times.

Step One: Compose the Shot

In the image above, we composed the shot, but we only exposed for skin tones and didn’t use any flash. Because we’ve exposed for the skin, we’ve lost a lot of the unique ambiance from the neon lights and other details in the scene. Everything looks sort of bright and washed out.

Step Two: Dial In Ambient Light

For this image, we’ve cut the ISO to lower the ambient light and capture more of the ambiance we lost in the initial shot. The neon light on the mural now creates a much more intriguing backdrop for our subject.

Step Three: Modify the Light

Based on the previous image, we can see that we don’t have enough light landing on our subject’s face; we’re going to need to modify the light and add a flash to bring our subject back as the focal point of the photo.

Add Off-Camera Flash

To illustrate what happens when using a flash with no grid, we added a Profoto B10 to camera right and kept our same camera settings from the previous shot. You can see that while our subject now has adequate light, the tremendous amount of light spill has killed the natural look of the scene.

Add a Grid to the Off-Camera Flash

In order to adequately light our subject while maintaining the ambient look we’re after, we’re going to need to add a grid to funnel the light coming from our off-camera flash. The grid will ensure the light doesn’t spill onto the walls or other parts of our scene that we want to keep underexposed.

Grids are measured in degrees, and we’re using a 20-degree grid. The lower the degree number, the tighter the focus of the beam of light coming from the flash, and vice versa. The 20-degree grid is sort of a middle-of-the-road option, not too tight or too wide.

[Related Reading: Creative Flash Photography Techniques for Natural and Dramatic Portraits in 4 Simple Steps]

When you compare the shot with the grid to the previous shot, you can see the grid’s impact on the image. This is a step in the right direction; however, we can still make adjustments to get to a better final image.

We’re using a Profoto B10, but you can use most any flash to achieve similar results. In this series of shots, we’re using the modeling light on the flash. In order to bump up the light output a bit, we simply leaned the light in closer to our subject.

Step Four: Use a Phone to Add a Reflection and Conceal Unwanted Elements in the Scene

The handrail didn’t look horrible in the previous images, but using my phone, I concealed the rail and added interest to the photo with the reflection.

After composing the shot and dialing in the details, we captured a few more photos and arrived the following final images.