If you've followed me and my work for a while, or you've attended any of my workshops, you'll no doubt have heard me preaching about watching out for 'clean lighting'. But what does that really mean?

When we were kids, we used to use white lighting in our photography. Back then it was easy. Just throw up a bunch of lights, point them roughly in the direction of the subject... and you're done.
Now that we're all grown up, we use coloured gels in our shots and that presents us with a whole host of new problems, especially when we want to use multiple lights.

The problem comes with multiple lights casting different colours on separate parts of our subject. Place these lights badly and the light starts to look very 'busy' and 'messy' incredibly quickly.
But counter to that, take a look at this image here and look at the very large areas of blue and orange. Imagine if this had lots of smaller sections of blue and orange on the face due to bad lighting. This then becomes very visually busy to look at and aesthetically not as pleasing.

So although that's a very brief explanation of 'clean lighting', I hope it gives you an idea of what I mean. So if you're using multiple coloured lights in your next shoot, pay close attention to where the light is falling and aim for nice big swathes of colour, compared to lots of little sections of distracting colour.

P.S. Yes I am aware that some of you still shoot white light as an adult. We still love you really 😁

Model: Isabelle