Basic Studio Portrait Lighting Setup

Note: I publish articles like this often. This one was last posted in April of 2018 and has since been updated.

Basic Studio Portrait Lighting Setup

by William Lulow

This is my basic studio lighting setup for portraits. I always start with a HOLLYWOOD LIGHTING and modify it as the occasion dictates. In addition to my large, round, soft portrait umbrella, I have a small softbox which I place in the MONSTER LIGHTING position to act as a fill in for the face. I then add one or two accent lights or EDGE LIGHTS on either side of the set to add some highlights to the overall look of the portrait. This is the lighting diagram:

Now, the beauty of this set up is that I can change the entire effect of the lighting simply by turning one or more lights on or off. I can vary the power settings of each head individually.  All are connected via radio slaves (Pocket Wizard). Lights can be controlled by turning on/off the radios. 

With today’s modern digital sensors in our DSLR cameras, we no longer need the power we needed when we were shooting large format film. I have found that I can sometimes run four lights from a single Dynalite M1000 unit.  Most of the time, however, I use two separate units so that I have a bit more control over the power to each light. Even at that, my main light (the big umbrella) is usually only 250 watt/seconds. And, I usually shoot portraits at f/11. To this setup I can always add a little kicker light behind the subject and aimed at the background to give it some gradation, thus improving the overall punch to the portrait.

Here, I added a single background light that I placed behind the subject to lighten up the background somewhat.  With this setup, you can also control the tone of the background just by whether you light it or not and how much light you use.

The take-away here is that you need a lighting setup in your studio that you can keep coming back to, that you can control easily to give you various lightings to create different moods.

For this shot, I used my main light without the umbrella to create a HOLLYWOOD LIGHT. This is a lighting that creates more drama to the image.

So, if you are thinking about setting up your own studio, you would probably need these items as a minimum:

1. Background
2. Stands to hold background
3. 4 light stands
4. 1 flash power pack
5. 3 flash heads
6. Tripod
7. Large black&white cards
8. Clamps

This would give you the basics so that you can begin to control your lighting and get some of the results you are after.