Basic Studio Portrait Lighting

Basic Studio Portrait Lighting

by William Lulow

Note: Thanks to actress Sydney Cook for modeling. Could probably write volumes about this, but will keep this article short. 

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.

In my home/studio loft space here in Livingston, this is what the setup looks like before adding any light modifiers. The light on the left will hold my large, custom umbrella. The one on the lower right is my fill-in softbox. There is one light for the background which I can either turn off or use and two accent lights to give some shine to the hair:

Here you can see the position of each of the five lights without any modifiers (umbrellas or barn doors). They are all set up in their respective positions ready to be applied.

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 all 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.

These are the power settings on my Dynalite power packs:

These are close to the lowest settings this generator is capable of: 250 watt/seconds on my main light and the other two lights on this pack share 125 watt/seconds making each 62.5 watt/seconds. And because those other lights are used “raw” without any diffusers, they are still one f/stop brighter than my main light which is bounced into my large umbrella.

Each photographer has to figure out his or her own particular setup based on equipment and desired lighting effects. I have written before about the difference in power settings between these studio flash units and some of the newer iterations of generators such as monolights. For example, the Westcott family of them has a unit that has a 400 watt/second output, which is more than enough for my purposes. It can also be reduced by putting it on half power which should be about right for the types of images I produce. Also keep in mind if you are using speedlights, the most sophisticated one’s output is only about 100 watt/seconds. So speedlights may not be powerful enough to use in a studio situation. (Research some of my archives for articles on using speedlights. I have written about them often.)

Here are the kinds of results you can obtain with this setup:

You can see the effects of the hightlights on the model’s hair as well as the mainlight and the fill-in light reflected in the beautiful catchlights in her eyes. (Another important thing the large umbrella mainlight does, along with the bright flash, is provide enough light so that the iris of the eyes is reduced thereby showing more of the eye color.You cannot get this result with a less powerful mainlight.) So, by simply using all or just a few of these lights, you have complete control over the lighting for your portrait. ON this shot, I also turned off the background light so that the background was all gray. If I turned it back on, this was the result:

Here, I turned on the background light to create the gradient background. The reason that this works is because the light is placed near the floor and aimed slightly up at the background so that the part of the background nearest the light will be rendered lighter and the higher parts of it will be darker. It’s an interesting technique I developed a while ago (not that others hadn’t used it as well, but it seemed to work nicely for the portraits I was making.)

One of the most important things about doing any kind of portrait session is that you must have control of your lighting so that your exposures are consistent. You don’t want to have a great expression ruined by a bad exposure. So once you have your lighting under control, then you can concentrate on communicating with your subject in order to elicit great expressions. You might be able to tell jokes or otherwise engage your subject in talking about their favorite hobbies or other interests. All of this we sometimes refer to as “patter.” If you have your patter down, as well as your lighting, you are on the right track to being able to produce some great portraits.