Lighting & Direction – Making a Fashion Portrait

A good portrait does not limit reality to its visible and material aspects, but on the contrary, it gives predominant significance to the invisible, to the sacred.

Sean Jackson. 2023

This one day, practical, hands-on workshop will explore the subtleties of lighting and direction for portraiture and fashion photography. The morning is interactive. We’ll be seeing and reading portraits, fashion portraits and other imagery, discussing what we find and how we are viewing. It is a powerful way to build confidence in your own viewpoint and give it voice. The afternoon is spent shooting portraits of models under varying light sources both outside and in the studio. It will facilitate you to develop your own understanding of light sources, light qualities & light textures. Through the practices you can develop foundational technical skills for using studio lighting, to progress you into developing your own light language.

Students should already have some practice of manual use of an SLR.

We will work with studio set ups in the gallery as well as out and about under the sky and finish the day with a presentation of the work. This will be a valuable addition to your portfolio.

What will I learn?

-Experience how to connect with your model or sitter in ease and awareness.

-Learn how to direct under different light sources.

-Get a feel for studio lights.

-Discover how to work with the sun and sky from different perspectives to create effects and moods.

-Get a feel for reflectors, scrims and blocks.

-Consolidate understanding of shutter speed, aperture and ISO in relation to varied lighting.

Photographer’s Approach:

To work with colours, one must first work with the light ‘Edvard Munch’.

There is no fixed, ultimate truth that can be brought to light and kept there forever. No two moments are exactly the same. Even two portraits taken on the same camera, of the same person, by the same photographer, milliseconds apart are slightly different and can never be repeated as the same. The truth of one moment is slightly different to the truth of the next. These slight differences can not be described because our spoken language is neither advanced enough nor finely tuned enough to do so. Truth can only be witnessed and felt through our own awareness as a felt connection, not a mental comprehension.

Even in the simplest of portrait scenes, we’ve got countless elements of visible and hidden life. The surface elements of light, face, expression, colours, tones, body, fabrics, clothing shapes, textures, visible space to the hidden elements of light source, emotion, connection, reason, air, body language, temperature, to name a few – all alive and changing form, subtly, moment to moment.

So what happens when the photographer directs their subject from an honest space of not knowing or pretending to possess a truth? An evolving space of sensing and intuition, jumping between following and leading, patiently coaxing a moment to emerge, where all of the life forces in the space breathe together for a millisecond and the picture reveals itself.

Sean Jackson 2023

About the Tutor

Sean Jackson is a Dublin based Photographer, Videographer and Creative Director. He regularly collaborates with other artists, brands and agencies in Ireland and internationally. His work has featured in The New York Times, I-d-Vice, and Photo Museum Ireland among others. He is a lecturer of Fashion Photography at IED in Milan, Italy.

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