Creating Colored Shadows

This shoot was a collaboration with my friends Amy Stackhouse, Mikhael Willis, and Melyssa Bradshaw, who are all amazing photographers. We found some reference images that had colored shadows like this image, and we tried to replicate that look with our own twist to it. This took a lot of experimenting and slight adjustments, and yes, even a little bit of color theory. To get this look we used three speed lights with red, green, and blue gels over them. Where the three different colored lights intersect, white light is created. This white light has to be positioned directly over the model’s face so that you don’t get any weird colors on the model, but the shadows from the three lights will still be different colors. Then it just comes down to moving the lights around to get the shadows in the right place, and playing with the gels and flash intensity to change how strong the colors appear.