Shooting with lighting this way HARD Lighting

Has anyone ever shot with there strobe lights with no umberlla or softbox. Just the straight light hitting the model?

why I never thought of that, I'll never know...

just kidding!

yeah it's a look.

it can be sort of clinical.

you mean with small metal reflector or just the bare bulb?

I've seen hard lighting used quite effectively for dramatic, high contrast urban pics. It is veyr effective in the right situation.

I use hard light all the time. Much for the same reason that you would want a softbox, to control and shape your image. When you skip a layer of diffusion, you also gain more power which can influence my decision.

I do a lot of shooting with a reflector and no diffusers or a reflector with a tight grid. Hard, contrasty light is really wonderful and so many people forget about it, thinking that soft light from large diffused modifiers is the only way to light.

I shoot plenty of stuff with hard light... coming from very tightly gridded softboxes.

I don't use much bare-bulb light because of the spill and unpredictability. Can't say I use small reflectors as front lights either. They just don't cover evenly enough (unless you put them very far away) which produces unflattering light on the parts of the body that aren't lit head-on. The unattractive way that digital cameras capture graduation in shadow areas doesn't help either.

The closest I get to small reflectors is using small silver beauty dishes and Elinchrom sports reflectors like the maxi-lite - at least they're large enough to evenly cover a half-body shot.

Would love to see some of you lots hard lighting work. I did some the other day with two 13.5 reflectors.

well, here is an example of hard light shot.

I only use non-diffused light for skateboarding basically.

Heres a hard light shot where I just needed as much power as possible...

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Great shots there Patrick!

Amazing stuff! Hard lighting of what I ment was like let say you have ur alien bee kit or lighting kit, all you do is turn it on. and have that metal covering over the bulb. No softbox, umbrella, beauty dish, reflectors, etc... Just that one light.