Let’s Talk Rembrandt
Let's talk Rembrandt. Yes, the painter but also the infamous lighting pattern used by photographers to create dramatic yet simple lighting for their portraits. Rembrandt's work was well known for his subjects having one part of the face fully illuminated with the other side showing an inverted triangle underneath the subject's eye.
The ideal Rembrandt lighting in photography is recommended to be no wider than the subject's eye and no longer than the nose. Of course, it's a suggestion and not exactly a hard-fast rule. Rembrandt can be recreated with many different light sources from strobes to reflectors to natural light. You just gotta look for the inverted triangle on the other side of the face.
Here are some examples of Rembrandt lighting caught in my recent work. These images are lit with a double diffusion umbrella as the key light and a bare bulb shot into the white side of the V-Flat to create subject separation from the background and fill in some of the shadows on the other side of his face. Some are more extreme than others but once you start to see this lighting pattern you'll begin to notice it in other photographers' works.
Can you find the triangle? (:
