Gary Regester

Gary trained in advertising photography at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. After assisting fashion and celebrity photographer, Moshe Brakha, he became staff photographer for United Artist Records [now, EMI/Liberty Records] in Hollywood. In 1979, Gary together with Tom Frost, formed CHIMERA, introducing portable accessory softlight attachments to advertising, portrait photographers and cinematographers throughout the world. In 1986, Gary formed his own company, Plume Ltd., to market a more sophisticated light diffusion "tent" named the WAFER. In 2004, together with Pratt Institute Design Instructor, he designed the Lowel Ego desktop digital imaging light, an easy to use lighting solution that logically follows the Chimera and Plume design principles.

For this shoot, we are lighting our two young models with two EGOs. "KEY/FILL" is the classic formula of portrait photographers (but there is no One Way! - Amen). The idea is that the "KEY" light (the light farthest to the left and closest to our subject in our set up photo) creates roundness and depth, aka 3D, in the subject, while the fill EGO, back at the camera, opens up the shadows and flattens the overall image.

So, two opposing ideas! - one light creates contrast or 3D and one light creates flatness or 2D - so that the two have to be balanced in order to result in a smooth successful portrait. Easiest way to increase and decrease the light intensity is to move the lights towards or away from the subject. Remember your physics class, Lambert's Inverse Square Law states that you double the distances, the radiant body is one quarter the strength (or something like that). So closer, our KEY, the brighter. The farther, our "FILL", the dimmer - and the "falloff" is amazingly quick. Another way to reduce the brightness of the "FILL" EGO is to loosen (aka turn OFF) one of the two lamps. Note again the light foreground and reflector card to further reduce contrast and open the shadows.

For the still life coffee pot shown here, the rounded light quality from the single EGO clearly shows up to enhance the mirrored metal surface of the subject. The bounce reflector gives a graceful quality to the fill side of the objects.