How to shoot hard light studio photos

Shooting hard light in the studio is a great way to work with minimal equipment and get amazing results. Hard light gives you the high-contrast shadows, textured skin and plenty of 'wow' factor that you can see in these images, and can be well matched with lots of fashion looks. It works equally well in black & white and color and gives you plenty of shape and impact.

One of my surprising discoveries in 2021 was shooting with this lighting style. It's very different than my usual setups and, although I'd seen it many times before, I thought it might be difficult to make it look beautiful. I was wrong! I ended up practicing it, using it on several jobs then including it as part of One Light Magic, my course for creating stunning images using only a single strobe.

This 'bulb' style is simple to achieve, looks incredible and all you need is a white wall and a light—you don't even need a modifier so this is probably the cheapest way to get such a striking studio look! Tap the video below for a quick explainer!

Bulb photography has its origins in two photographic traditions—the serious portraiture of Herb Ritts and a more commercial look seen in Calvin Klein's 90s adverts. You can achieve drama and depth in the images by controlling the size and shape of the shadow.

You can learn both those setups (and a load more) in One Light Magic.

Essentially, to get this kind of look you need two pieces of lighting equipment:

• A studio strobe
• (Optional) metal reflector (an 8" one for example)

In the images in this post I just placed the strobe to the right hand side of the model at about head height, set my exposure and shot. My camera settings (as with most of my studio work) were:

• F9
• 1/125 sec
• ISO 100

The retouching process was heal/clone/dodge & burn, with a gentle color grade/black & white toning in Photoshop.