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.

 

 
Thanks for a really helpful class! I enjoyed each session — well designed, with the right amount of photo critique and theory — and I feel much more comfortable handling my camera now. You offered great atmosphere in the sessions and provided really useful feedback and practical tips. Crucial for myself: Photography is getting closer and closer to my heart and I'm eager to keep my photography practice going and keep shooting almost daily to improve – and to find my voice as a photographer. Thank you for helping me taking these next steps! Hope we see each other in future classes!
—Stefan (Vienna)
The class was great. Néstor is a wonderful teacher, encouraging, critical in the right ways, and super nurturing. I enjoyed class with him so much.
—Kamal (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.