A simple portrait photography setup: Part 2 – Lighting & modifiers
Hi everyone. Welcome back to Tech Booth and welcome back to this part two of a simple studio portrait photography set up. In the first part, we looked at the different things that you're going to need for this setup, and we also looked at the camera settings. Now, with the camera settings, we set up our settings so that it excludes all ambient light. Ambient light is not necessarily a bad thing, But in this case we excluded ambient light so that we have full control of our lighting setup. The other reason we don't want the ambient light is so that it doesn't affect our white balance. When you have a lot of different kinds of lights in the room, they can affect your white balance and you might get an image that has a tint to it. If you are in fluorescent lighting, for example, that tint might be a greenish color, or if you're an incandescent lighting that might be an orange color. Those things can be fixed in post, but it's always best to try and get that right the first time.
For our demonstration. We're just going to be using one light and we are going to be using both the umbrella as a modifier and the parabolic soft box. One of the reasons why we use modifiers is so that we soft and the light. Most of the time. We don't want to hide shadows on the face of our subject. There are times when you want to hide shadows for effect, but for most portrait photography, you want nice, soft, flattering shadows And so we use some kind of diffuser to spread the light out and soften it the other reason we use modifiers is to have some level of control on the direction of the light.
With simple umbrellas, it tends to be a bit more difficult to control that direction. But with something like a parabolic soft box that we're going to be using, you have more control on the direction where your light is going to be, and you also reduce any spill onto your background and to the sides of your subject. if you add a grid onto your soft box, then you have even more control on the direction the light is going to be First thing we want to look at is where you are going to have your subjects sitting or standing. Generally, you don't want your subject to be too close to the background because we don't want any shadows falling on the background. And we also want our background to be slightly out of focus so that you get a nice, clean, smooth background.
Where your subjects will stand or sit will also depend on the framing that you're going to be using for your photography. in this tutorial. We're just going to be doing head shot. So we don't need a lot of background. one thing you need to note about the sitting and standing position of your subject, especially the head position, you must make sure that they at least look up a little bit, because that reflection of the light in their eyes produces a nice catch light if they look down, that reflection will not be caught in the eyes. and your eyes will look dark with no sparkle and no life. Our second consideration is our choice of modifiers. there are a lot of them out there, but we're just going to be looking at two the simple umbrella and parabolic soft box.
In terms of placing your lights, we are going to use a very simple rule that is very easy to remember and that is if you're going to be shooting from one side, a good place to start is 45 degrees to one side or the other. and you also lift your modifier up and above your subject and angle the light down at 45 degrees. So that's a simple rule to remember. Good place to start. when you put the light on one side, you will get some shadows on the other side.
If you want to fill those shadows in, you could always have a reflector on that opposite side to fill in those shadows. if you want even lighting on the face with even shadows on both sides of the face, then the best place to place your light is directly in front of your subject and you raise it up and angle it 45 degrees down onto them. What you will get is even lighting with a few shadows under the eyes, under the nose and under the chin if you have good modifiers, then those shadows will not be too harsh and distracting. if you want to get rid of those shadows or soften them even more, you could get a reflector and just have your subject hold the reflector up So that light bounces from the reflector back up to soften those shadows under the chin, under the nose and under the eyes. in our case we're just using this one light so we're not too worried about the shadows.
The umbrella can be used in different ways. you can use it as a reflective modifier or a shoot through modifier. And what that means is you can have it in such a way that it reflects light back onto your subject if you look at the inside of this umbrella that we're using, for example, it has like a silver lining inside. It's not completely solid, but it does have a reflective silver lining inside. So you can use that lining as a reflective modifier. And so you have that reflective surface facing your subject and then you shoot your flash at the reflective surface. So that light bounces back onto your subject. and that helps to diffuse the light and give it a bit of direction.
Black covering on the umbrella as you're using it as a reflective umbrella, makes sure that there's no spill of light on the other side of the umbrella. Now, if you want to use it as a shoot through umbrella, you then take off the black covering, turn the umbrella around so that your flash is shooting directly at your subject. But the light is passing through the umbrella before it reaches your subject. that tends to spread the light out and also soften it.
The only problem with the umbrella is it is difficult to control the spill on the sides and onto your background. You can get big umbrellas that are deeper and those will give you even softer light. Umbrellas are really cheap, so you can start off your photography with umbrellas. as you gain experience, get yourself some nice soft boxes to use in portrait photography. Soft boxes are really good in giving light direction, especially if you add a grid onto the soft box. Some soft boxes will have double diffusion. What that means is they have two layers of diffusion panels that you fix inside the soft box. So the light is diffused twice to give a really soft look. You can get many different effects by just moving that one light to one side or the other, or moving it up and down.
And that's it. A very simple one like set up that you can use to start your portrait photography. as you get more experience, you can add additional lights to your setup to get different looks for your shots.
