Multiple Lights On Location

Multiple Lights On Location

by William Lulow

As I often do these days, I get jobs where there are a number of people to shoot for headshots, on location at the client’s premises. Sometimes the space is adequate for me to use my 5-light setup, other times it’s not so easy. Here was a conference room that I had to use recently:

This was really half a conference room, but look at the lights I set up: my big umbrella main light, a softbox fill-in, two accent lights back by the background and a background light just behind the stool. FIVE LIGHTS, in this tiny space. It can be done if you follow the same steps to produce quality head shots. This is one from this setup:

The fill-in was just enough and the accent lights lit up the hair to produce a very good head shot for this company.

I made about 13 headshots in about 3.5 hours, getting the cost down to about $150 per person, versus my normal rate of about $500 if someone booked a solo shot in my studio. It’s the same lighting, producing the same kind of shot, but it takes some know-how to set this up on location. I have actually shot in smaller spaces. It is not as comfortable, but this is one of the smallest I have had to work in. Here are a couple of others:

The trick is to be able to reproduce a lighting setup no matter the space. This was another half-conference room space at a small law firm.

Again the beauty of the five-light setup is that it can be modified to whatever subject you need to photograph. Lights can be turned off or on to obtain various results. For example, you might not need the rear accent lights for a bald person because you wouldn’t want the head to shine. On the other hand, a woman with a nice hair style would benefit from the accents:

So, again, this is an easily modifiable way to create beautiful portraits or headshots and be able to adjust the lighting to whomever you need to photograph.

This is the basic setup:

The idea is to provide soft light on the subject’s face with a large umbrella and a fill-in light from the opposite direction. The strength of the fill-in light determines how much shadow is on the face. The rear lights act as kind of hair lights to provide accents and the background light adds some dimension to the image by creating a gradient background. The thing to understand about any lighting like this is that the accent lights are actually stronger than the main umbrella light because they are not diffused. The accents are produced because the lights are actually one f/stop brighter than the main light because the main light and fill-in lights are diffused. One by the big umbrella and the other by a soft box. All the other lights are used direct. Here’s another good example of what the accents do:

So, I can create this kind of lighting just about anywhere, even if the space is limited. When you work with studio flash, it’s the flash-to-subject distance that really creates the exposure. If you are careful with your setup, you can make really beautiful images with it. Also, for the last several years I have been using Westcott monolights which can be controlled by a trigger mounted on the camera. Lights can be turned off or on or their intensity modified right from the camera position. Now I also carry quite a few extra batteries for these lights. In the days of film when we did all day photoshoots, battery powered lights just weren’t practical. We also needed much more power for the studio flashes because we were using slower film in large sizes, sometimes up to 11×14 inches as well as camera lenses which were much slower. These days, the process is much simpler, but the rules of lighting and exposure still apply.