Butterfly lighting is a portrait lighting pattern where the key light is placed above and directly centred with a subject’s face. This creates a shadow under the nose that resembles a butterfly.

butterfly lighting is typically used in beauty and fashion photography, because It’s a light pattern that flatters almost everybody, making it one of the most common lighting setups. Butterfly lighting was used to photograph some of the most famous stars from classic Hollywood.

some examples of butterfly lighting are:

All Paramount lighting consists of is a key light placed above and directly centered with a subject’s face. You want this light source to be above and behind the camera, angled down towards your subject. This can be achieved with either a continuous light softbox or a strobe / off-camera flash.

my attempt:

as you can see here I achieved the signature butterfly shadow under his nose in most of my attempts in this photography achieving both a softer approach to the photography style and harsher and sharper shadows.

in an attempt to better understand the lighting set up and the effects of different posing i later put my self in the place of the model and experimented with different angles, lighting positions and reflective sheets.

Here are the results after editing:

In these first two I attempted to recrate the classic holly wood editing where this style of photography originated, with very harsh shadows allowing for the contouring of the cheekbones and drawing focus to the jaw and eyes, I believe I achieve this effect in these photos and I believe I achieved the signature butterfly shadow.

In these photographs I attempted to achieve a softer look in the photography, still outlining the key features of the face and still showcasing the signature butterfly shadow but creating an over all softer effect for the photographs.