Light Modifiers for an Old Hollywood Look | Inside Fashion and Beauty Photography with Lindsay Adler

There is something timeless about Old Hollywood imagery. When you photograph your subjects with the same quality of light and styling as the Golden Age of Hollywood, they instantly are imbued with a feeling of elegance and class. A study of Old Hollywood lighting techniques will reveal that the masters were generally using Tungsten hot lights much like Mole Richardsons. Today, however, we are more likely to use studio strobes and constant LED light sources. In this video, I will take you through my three favorite light modifiers when emulating the Old Hollywood look. If you’d like to go a lot more in-depth into this concept, be sure to check out my lighting recipe guide with 20+ setups! http://lindsayadler.photo/oldhollywood These three light modifiers are Fresnel, Optical Spot, and Magnum Reflector. Let’s take a look! #1 Fresnel: Fresnel modifiers focus light and were extremely common in glamour portraits of the 1930/s40s movie studios. Hurrell commonly used this modifier (with a lens similar to what is found in lighthouses) in his portraits for a hard yet smooth quality of light. Today’s version of this modifier is the Nanlite Fresnel attachment for the Nanlite Forza 500. When combined with several Nanlite Pavotubes for hair lights, you can see that even using modern LED light sources we can achieve a striking look of the Old Hollywood masters. #2 Optical Spot: An Optical Spot uses a lens to create a crisp quality of light with very defined edges. Another benefit of the Westcott Optical Spot is that you can create a spotlight effect on your subject or the background. If you study Horst and Hurrell, at times you will see oval-shaped highlights on the background to create visual interest. While they were using other spotlight modifiers, our modern-day equivalent is an optical spot. In this setup, I used a Westcott Optical Spot on the background (for the oval-shaped highlight) as well as on the face to create a beautiful, crisp light source. #3 Magnum