The Lighting Mistakes Hiding in Your Portraits

A photographer critiquing a stranger's early work is common enough, but here the images being torn apart turn out to be his own from 15 years ago. The fixes are the same ones any photographer can apply to their own portraits right now.

John Gress walks through a series of portraits and points out what works and what he would change, starting with a vintage-styled shot that has two catch lights in each eye. Gress explains that the double catch light comes from using a small fill source alongside a small main light, and he offers a couple of routes out of it. You can clone out the smaller one in post, or you can switch to a larger main light on camera left and add a large fill source behind the camera turned way down. A big source at low power stays fairly transparent, so it lifts the shadows without announcing itself. A V-flat, a reflector, or a piece of foam board does the same job for less money.

The middle of the video digs into lighting patterns and where the eye travels. Gress flags a shot of a woman lit broadly, from ear to nose tip, which makes her head read larger, and he recommends short lighting instead by turning her toward the main light. He notes the convention favors short lighting for women and treats broad lighting as more forgiving on men, then immediately tells you not to follow the rule blindly. Elsewhere he calls out hot spots that steal attention from the face: an edge light hitting the side of a nose, a hair light cooking a subject's trapezius, a blown-out background between a subject's legs. The through-line is simple. The eye goes to the brightest part of the frame, so anything brighter than the face is competing with it.

The outdoor examples are where the advice gets most practical. Gress describes a flash portrait that landed in an awkward middle ground, bright enough to look dramatic but not bright enough to underexpose the background and pull focus onto the subject. He lays out the two clean choices for overcast light: a large source low and gentle for a natural look, or a strong source that darkens the background. He also points to high-speed sync and a wider aperture as the fix for a shot stuck at roughly 1/200 at f/10, where the boats behind the subject lost their sense of place. And there's a memorable bit about reflector placement outdoors that I'll leave for you to hear in his words.

The self-critique format is worth sitting with, because it mirrors how photographers actually improve. Gress didn't get better by reading rules once. He got better by shooting, looking hard at his own results, inviting feedback, and repeating that loop for years. Setting up a folder of your own work from a year or two ago and running the same audit he runs here is a free exercise anyone can do this weekend. Look for double catch lights, hot backgrounds, light coming from below, and faces that aren't the brightest thing in the frame. Naming the flaw is most of the fix, and doing it on your own images teaches faster than any single tutorial because the mistakes are yours to recognize the next time you're on set.

One principle ties nearly every note together: fix it in camera when you can, and save post for what's left over. Raising crushed blacks under a subject's pec or painting in a darkened background patch is possible, but Gress is honest that the detail may simply not be there to recover. A larger fill source, a light moved back toward the background, a subject turned a few degrees, or a reflector held higher solves the problem before the shutter fires.

Watch the full breakdown above to see every image Gress dissects and hear the reflector tip he saves for the outdoor shots.