Butterfly lighting is a lighting technique used by photographers where a light source such as a flash head is placed right above and ever so slightly in front ‘an exact 45-degree angle’ of the models face. This creates a small butterfly-shape made from a shadow under the nose. This technique is often used to make the model look thinner and their eyes look larger.

Creation and Development of Butterfly Lighting

One of the most famous photographers to use butterfly lighting was George Hurrell. Hurrel used multiple sources such as precision lighting, spotlights, shadows, and hand-retouching. He made ‘romantic portraits’ these portraits then became his trademark style, this style of photographing became extremely famous and glamourous in the celebrity and movie industry. This look then became known as “Hurrell style.” Here are some examples of ‘Hurrel style’ butterfly lighting images.

My Attempt at Butterfly Lighting

Whilst editing this 1/4 shot photo I focused on capturing butterfly lighting. In this setup, my light is placed directly in front of my model , right behind my camera. It was around one foot above my model’s face, this creates a slight shadow under her nose. This shadow is meant to represent a butterfly shape, to edit these photos I mainly focused on decreasing the highlights, increasing the texture and increasing the shadows.

EXAMPLE:

Above is a perfect example of butterfly lighting, this shadow under the lose creates a butterfly- like shape. Here are my attempts of butterfly lighting in my first photoshoot.

These are the camera settings I used for these photos, I focused on having a reasonable shutter speed, a fast shutter speed creates a shorter exposure and a slow shutter speed gives the me a longer exposure. I also made sure my aperture was not too high, if it was, too much light would be let in and my photo will look washed out.

This photo I took is high quality due to my model having a strong pose and the photo is balanced, however, my shutter speed was too high. I want the shutter to move fast and let in less light. Next time I will start with a shutter speed around 1/125 for my still portraits and increase as needed to darken your photos.