DM Photo’s Studio Lighting Advantage
The absolute biggest factor in how your photos ultimately look is LIGHTING! Regardless of how good you are at Photoshop, or your multi-thousand dollar cameras and lenses, if you don’t have exquisite lighting on your subjects when the image is taken, say sayonara to what could have been a great portrait. LIGHTING IS KING.
So, how do you ensure stellar lighting no matter where you are? Bring it with you.
DM Photo takes a unique approach to lighting your images. We have invested heavily not only in professional studio lighting, but in portable professional studio lighting. In fact, this is a key advantage of DM Photo over other photographers, the vast majority of which do not use lighting like we do. Studio lighting will SIGNIFICANTLY increase the quality of your images:
Notice that the brightness of the backgrounds is the exact same in these two images; only the brightness of the subject differs. That’s because the images were taken with the exact same camera settings, the only difference being that the image on the left was taken without our softbox whereas the the image on the right was taken with our softbox. You might be thinking, "Why can’t you just adjust camera settings until the subject is as bright in the no-softbox image as he is in the softbox image?" Well, you can, but then the background will be as bright as the subject, which removes attention from the subject and places it on the background – not ideal:
Okay, so maybe we can’t just change camera settings, but why can’t we fix the brightness of the subject in Photoshop? Again, we can, but there are many drawbacks (several of which apply to the above scenario, as well, in which we brightened the whole image). First, you get a weird halo around the subject from brightening him. Next, the colors still just aren’t as vivid. Also, it takes more time (i.e. more cost to our customers). In addition, look at the eyes – they are much brighter and more interesting in the image taken with the softbox. And last of all, the directionality of light gained by using the softbox creates a nice gradient across the subject’s face, as opposed to the flat and uninteresting lighting in the no-softbox image:
It’s attention to the small details like these that brings clients to us. Good lighting is rarely available without engineering it. Lighting will have more of an affect on the quality of your photos than any other factor. We’ll be honest, you should hire us. But, if for some crazy reason you don’t, make sure whoever you do hire has access to and knows how to use quality studio lighting. See more examples of portraits taken with studio lighting in each of our galleries: