Do-It-Yourself Lighting at Home
© Nestor Pérez-Molière
ONLINE COURSE

Do‑It‑Yourself Lighting at Home

Interested in this class? Email us and we'll notify you next time it runs.

Look closely at how to manipulate the lighting in your photography in a do-it-yourself environment utilizing common household items. Through demonstrations and weekly assignments, students will learn how to use ambient and artificial light to illuminate subjects. Understanding how light behaves will allow us to manipulate it through reflections, diffusion, and blocking. Portraiture, self-portraiture, environmental, and still life photography will be considered in this course, and we will look at artists who sculpt light in their work. Supported by in-class critiques, this is a good opportunity to work on a project that involves shaping light, or to simply experiment with different techniques each week. This course looks to demystify studio lighting through an “at-home” approach.

 

 
It has been such an inspiring process taking classes with Samantha and Néstor. They’re such dedicated and talented teachers — I owe you both a lot of gratitude.
—MG (Brooklyn)
I really enjoyed Nester’s class! He is great at giving us focus and direction.
—Ellen (New York City)


Néstor Pérez-Molière
Néstor Pérez-Molière

Néstor Pérez-Molière was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and currently resides in the Bronx, New York. His art entails a process of self-discovery; a series of confessionals revealing private conflicts; hoping towards catharsis. Through this cathartic process he hopes to connect with the viewer’s struggles and depathologize negative feelings so that they can be seen as a source for political action rather than its antithesis. Néstor exposes mental health issues like depression, dysmorphia, food addictions, and loneliness: describing their mechanisms, scrutinizing their origins, and illuminating the impossibility of fixing them. His practice mainly takes place in the realm of photography but has also incorporated performance, drawing, video, installation, and intaglio techniques into his works.

He received an MFA from Hunter College and holds a BSc in Botany. He was part of EmergeNYC 2023, Artist in the Marketplace 2017, and Creative Capital’s Taller 2019 mentorship programs, and was included in The Bronx Museum of the Arts Fourth Biennial. He has exhibited at the Museo de las Américas, the Clemente Soto Vélez, Bronx Art Space, Longwood Gallery, and the Liga de Estudiantes de Artes de San Juan, Puerto Rico. In 2023 he was a resident at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Governors Island Arts Center and Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts residencies. Interested in becoming an educator, he teaches, and has taught, digital and darkroom photography, as well as media literacy at the International Center of Photography, Parsons School of Design, Art Academy of Cincinnati, Fairleigh Dickinson University, The Point CDC, and StrudelmediaLive.

Néstor teaches lighting for still life, Lightroom, and more for StrudelmediaLive.