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Add-On Course End of 2026

Lighting:
Studio & Flash

Two days on artificial light. The Photography Class teaches you to read the light you are given. This one teaches you to build the light you want.

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Prerequisite: Photography Class. You need it completed rather than running alongside. This course assumes you already control exposure, focus, and composition, and that you can see what light is doing before you try to change it. View the Photography Class
The Idea
From Reading Light to Making Light

Photography teaches you the five aspects of light: source, quantity, quality, direction, and colour. Nothing about that changes here. What changes is who decides them.

Outdoors you find your source, work around its quantity, wait for its quality, move yourself for direction, and accept its colour. In the studio you choose, dial, build, reposition, and specify all five. There are no new categories to learn. There is only control, and the price of control is that nothing is decided for you any more.

Four things genuinely have no natural-light equivalent, and we cover each one directly: multiple sources and the ratios between them, fall-off across a scene, the fact that a flash is an event rather than a state, and modifiers as instruments for bending the five aspects.

Curriculum
Two Days, Twelve Sessions

Every session runs the same way: theory, demonstration, guided practice, review. Day one is about controlling light. Day two is about designing it.

S1
30 min
From Reading Light to Making Light
The Photography Class taught you to read light. Here you learn to build it. Same five aspects, one difference: nothing is decided for you any more.
S2
90 min
The Two Rules You Cannot Cheat
Apparent size decides hard or soft, not wattage. Fall-off decides how fast light dies across a scene. Every studio mistake beginners make traces back to one of these two.
S3
60 min
Continuous Light
LED panels, practicals, work lights. You see the result as you build it, which is why we teach multi-light setups here first. Crosses over directly into video work.
S4
2 hours
Flash Fundamentals
Anatomy, power in fractions, triggers, modelling lamp. Why shutter speed is not one of the four dials that control flash. You establish your own camera's sync speed in class rather than trust a number on a slide.
S5
2 hours
Two Exposures in One Frame
The centre of the course. Shutter speed moves the ambient and leaves the flash untouched. That single row in the table is why flash is a creative tool and not a brightness fix.
S6
60 min
Modifiers
Umbrellas, softboxes, grids, flags, bounce. Every modifier read back through the five aspects: does this change quality, direction, quantity, or colour? Nothing here is a new category.
S7
60 min
The Roles of Light
Key, fill, rim, background. Ratios measured in stops rather than guessed. Built on continuous light so you watch the ratio change as you move the source.
S8
2.5 hours
Portrait Lighting Patterns
Butterfly, loop, Rembrandt, split. Broad against short. Feathering and catchlights. You walk one light through an arc around a face and shoot every position, and you leave with your own reference sheet.
S9
90 min
Controlling the Background
Black background in a bright room using distance, not paint. Separating subject exposure from background exposure. Gradients and gobo patterns.
S10
2 hours
Flash Meets Sun
The session that matters most on this coast. Fill flash under a hard midday sun, backlight with a lit face, overpowering the sun and the sync-speed wall. And wind, because a softbox is a sail.
S11
60 min
Colour
Flash is daylight by design. Gel it to match a tungsten room, then balance to the room. Creative gels for a background that separates.
S12
90 min
Final Assignment & Review
Three images, each with a setup diagram you draw by hand. Assessed on intent, not gear. Can you say why the light is where it is?

A short product and still life session runs at the end of day two when time allows.

Outcome
What You Leave With

You can predict whether a source will be hard or soft before you switch it on, and predict fall-off across a scene and use it on purpose. You can set a manual flash exposure without chimping your way there, and you can say which dial moves the flash, which moves the ambient, and which moves both.

Beyond the technical floor: you design a setup backwards from the result you want, build the classic portrait patterns with one light, control the background independently of your subject, and balance flash against the sun on location.

Equipment
What You Light With

You work with a Godox flash, several continuous studio lights, softboxes, professional umbrellas, light stands and C-stands, and fabric backdrops at three by six metres. Everything is provided.

Multi-light work runs on the continuous lights, where you watch the ratio change as you move the source. It is the faster way to learn, because the eye reads light quicker than a histogram does. Flash work runs on a single light, which is how most portraits you admire were lit anyway.

Launch
Coming End of 2026

Lighting: Studio & Flash launches at the end of 2026. Course materials are in development.

Course fee: KES 3,000 / USD 24 for 2 training days (KES 1,500 / USD 12 per training day). Mineral water is included. Lunch is not included for this course.

Group size: 2 to 3 students, never more than 4. We run this one small because there is a single flash and a studio of a fixed size, and everyone needs their hands on the light.

We will notify you when dates and application details are released.

In the meantime, start with the Photography Class, which is a prerequisite for this course and is open for booking now.

Join the Waiting List for Lighting

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Lighting: Studio & Flash launches at the end of 2026. Join the waiting list and we will notify you first when dates and application details are released.

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After Lighting: Editing

Once you can build the light, the last step is finishing the file. Lightroom and Photoshop take your RAW work from correct to finished. It builds on the Photography Class too, so you can take it before or after this one.

Explore Lightroom & Photoshop