Beautiful portrait lighting is not difficult to achieve. There are exceptions to what I'm about to write -- this is art, after all -- but the ingredients are: (1) Use diffused light, (2) avoid harsh shadows around the eyes, nose, and mouth, (3) the nose should never be highlighted no matter how attractive it might be, and (4) make sure the background is darker than the subject. I photographed this lovely young girl in Inle Lake, Burma. We were standing under the roof of an outdoor market and it was raining. I asked her to turn her face toward the light of the large opening to the outside and positioned myself so the background behind her was much darker than her illuminated face. Note that her nose doesn't cast a shadow on her cheek. That is due to the angle of her face to the light. Because of the rainy (and therefore dark) conditions, I raised the ISO to 800 so the shutter speed -- 1/160th of a second -- was fast enough to hand hold the camera. The aperture was f/5, and I used a 24-105mm lens set to the longest focal length of 105mm.
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