Portraits Unplugged

Portraits Unplugged is all about working with natural light, nothing technical or mechanical. In this engaging online workshop, Bobbi Lane teaches you how to find and work with natural light to make flattering and dynamic portraits of any subject. The beauty of available light is its ability to describe your subject from powerful and strong to soft and creamy. You scout locations for the light and look for options that can surprise us with its complexity as well as find the simple and clean look for smooth skin tones. 

Everyone has natural light available, but not necessarily the understanding of how to find and manipulate it with reflectors and diffusers. These techniques help to create the most pleasing or effective images. We work with all kinds of light: hard, soft, bounced, window light, backlight, open shade, and garage door lighting and explore how the qualities of each contribute to the feeling of the portrait. In addition, Bobbi shows you how to create a backyard studio with a canopy and reflectors that mimics studio lighting. 

The most important part of our portrait is not the subject, but how we, as visual artists, choose to define our subject. We work on capturing the essence of the people by the use of posing, expressions, tonality, composition, color, backgrounds, and props. 

Bobbi’s workshop covers the “rules” of Portraits Unplugged, how to effectively and creatively use reflectors and diffusers, color and texture of light, accurate skin tones, scouting the light, times of day to shoot, high and low key, and story-telling portraits.

This is not an overly technical workshop, but is for all photographers who want to strengthen their people skills as well as their appreciation of light for creating dynamic portraits.