When To Modify Your Lighting For Portraits

When To Modify Your Lighting For Portraits

by William Lulow

Many times, photographers develop a kind of formula for their lighting applications and get kind of “locked in” to following it for all their portrait assignments. It doesn’t happen all the time, but I think we need to keep an eye out for when it does. If you do a lot of portraits and you have a small-ish studio, one that doesn’t allow for great differences about how to set up your lights, then formulas tend to be problem solvers. But if you’re not careful and you lose sight of the ability to treat each session as “new and different,” then formulas can quickly become problem creators. It’s not that the pictures for one particular client will be bad, it’s just that they will begin to look like all the others. This is especially true if you always tend to use your studio for most of your portrait work.

One solution to this is to shoot more “location” portraits. Then, backgrounds and other elements will be different each time. But we can all take a lesson from the master of what he called “environmental portraiture,” Arnold Newman, who usually included some visual element that was a clue to his subject’s work. If you are just doing commercial headshots, this is not usually possible. Although, many commercial headshots for actors and models are often taken outdoors these days.

So, with all this being said, my particular approach is always to examine the human face with the idea of analyzing its size, shape and character features that could be exploited to produce more effective portraits without relying on a set formula. Here are a couple of examples:

This face was pretty round so it called for a lighting that had some shadow. Notice how the right side of her face has a little bit of shadow to it. It has to be very subtle, but the shadow makes the face seem much more narrow than it actually is. Photographers must think of these things whenever a new client comes in the door. Notice that this image also has only one main light with no fill-in light. If you follow this blog, you know that I have a large umbrella that serves as my mainlight. Because it is so large, the light it produces on the human face is soft enough by itself to provide good quality light. Here are some more examples. These are extreme to make the lighting more obvious:

Here is an example of what is referred to as a “narrow lighting,” the definition of which states that the mainlight is placed to light the side of the face that is AWAY from the camera. So here you can see that the side facing the camera is all in shadow. This is an extreme example, but you can see how it makes the face seem much more narrow because you can’t see the shadow detail. Here is the same model, with a “broad lighting” which is defined as having the mainlight hit the side of the face that is toward the camera:

Look how dramatically it changes the woman’s appearance! In this shot, the model’s face appears a bit wider than it normally is. Here are more examples of different types of lightings:

This is actually a “Rembrandt Lighting.” It has a tell-tale “window” of light under the eye on the opposite side of the face from the mainlight. But, there is enough detail to see facial features. This kind of light would probably not be acceptable for a commercial headshot, but this one was used on a website with other similar, contrasty lightings.

My portrait of author Ira Levin, used for his book “Boys From Brazil,” was a classic broad lighting which gave him a slight mysterious look, which the editors loved for the book. Bearded faces can normally take more intense lightings.

Here’s an image created with just an Edge Light plus a white card positioned just close enough to the camera-left side of the face to show some detail. But look how thin the face looks.

The take away from this article is that photographers need to examine their subjects carefully before a portrait session to determine whether or not a different lighting than one used normally is called for. You have to take into account the shape of the face, certain facial features, camera angles and lightings that would all serve to show the person in the most flattering way. This is especially true if you intend for your subjects to be happy with your efforts. If you are just shooting for yourself, then you can do whatever you wish. But commercial photographers most often, are, and should be trying to please their clients.