"School of Portraiture" - Lesson 06 - Introduction to Basic Studio Lighting

[Colin Southern]

Colin, what's the cheapest 2 strobe lighting kit you would recommend?

Hi Chriss,

Not sure what to say to be honest ... I've only ever worked with high-end gear (and even then I push it pretty hard). Personally I suspect that if you had anything less than around 500 w/s you might end up using apertures that start to give you DoF headaches if you're puching in close (unless that's what you're wanting). Plus, strobes that are slow to recycle don't work with my shooting style (it would break the momentum of the shoot something chronic).

My personal favourite starter kits are Elinchrom BXRi if that's any help.

[Crovean]

Hi Chriss,

Not sure what to say to be honest ... I've only ever worked with high-end gear (and even then I push it pretty hard). Personally I suspect that if you had anything less than around 500 w/s you might end up using apertures that start to give you DoF headaches if you're puching in close (unless that's what you're wanting). Plus, strobes that are slow to recycle don't work with my shooting style (it would break the momentum of the shoot something chronic).

My personal favourite starter kits are Elinchrom BXRi if that's any help.

With this kit you actually don't need a pocketwizard since it comes with skyport and the strobes has built in receivers it it.

I guess its time to start saving up for this suckers! hehehehe Thanks Colin.

[STKPhotoLA]

Thank you Colin,
this is really useful advice. However, the image you start your lesson with pales the final result. It's absolutely beautiful, rich, full of life, kind of like Flemish painting, three-dimensional, magic. Blows my hair off. I would hang it on my wall. The final image... yes, better separation, we can see more hair on top, but the magic is gone.

[Rollout]

Hey,
I just thought id take a go with your image and lighting.... I figured that you had used PS to adjust the lighting... Personally, i think colour correcting is important... before you notice the shadows and so on, the colour tells you if they sick or not ( if you had a green colour cast). After some minor correcting i also edited the lighting ratios. Hopefully you can see why Collin said it was underexposed. Also try and take note of the smaller details such as the eye and the shadows thats created around that area.

Lastly, when i was in university we had been told Males are to have a stronger lighting than females. SO in your case consider how the lighting shows the facial hair and hair line.

Hope this is a little useful.

[speedneeder]

Hi Rollout!
Thank you for your input. THe only adjustments I made was one tick of contrast and auto white balance in DPP. I wasn't so much worried about the color accuracy as I was making some different lighting from what I've done in the past. I have only so many options bouncing my shoe mounted flash, though I'm currently working on getting a flash through umbrella and some wireless stuff, and hopefully I'll figure out how to make good use of it.

[Colin Southern]

With this kit you actually don't need a pocketwizard since it comes with skyport and the strobes has built in receivers it it.

Yes. Sorry, I should have mentioned that.

Power control from the camera position speeds up shooting dramatically.

[Colin Southern]

Thank you Colin,
this is really useful advice. However, the image you start your lesson with pales the final result. It's absolutely beautiful, rich, full of life, kind of like Flemish painting, three-dimensional, magic. Blows my hair off. I would hang it on my wall. The final image... yes, better separation, we can see more hair on top, but the magic is gone.

Hi "STKPhotoLA",

There's always 1000 ways to light any situation; in this case I didn't take these shots for the lesson, they were just ones I'd captured as part of a regular shoot, so had to run with what I had, although not the 100% ideal. Personally, the light in the first image is a bit too contrasty for a woman (in my opinion anyway); it's very soft, but other than that, not particularly flattering. Kickers play a bigger or smaller part depensing on what you're doing, but the hairlight usually takes an image into the next dimension (again, in my opinion anyway).

[Colin Southern]

Hey,
I just thought id take a go with your image and lighting.... I figured that you had used PS to adjust the lighting... Personally, i think colour correcting is important... before you notice the shadows and so on, the colour tells you if they sick or not ( if you had a green colour cast). After some minor correcting i also edited the lighting ratios. Hopefully you can see why Collin said it was underexposed. Also try and take note of the smaller details such as the eye and the shadows thats created around that area.

I think that many details are important in many areas of photography. Certainly for studio work it's just a "given" that skin tones need to be accurate, exposure needs to be accurate etc. In terms of lighting ratios - yes - they can be adjusted in Photoshop, but getting them right in-camera is by far the quickest option (especially when you have 700+ to present for initial selects).

Lastly, when i was in university we had been told Males are to have a stronger lighting than females.

Well not stronger lighting per sec, but more contrast. That's the traditional view anyway.

Personally, I've been inverting some of the rules (hard light on women) and been getting good feedback from them, so perhaps it comes down to my old saying: "It's OK to break the rules so long as the image works. If you break the rules and the image DOESN'T work then ... you should have followed the rules!"

[Jim Bell]

In some of the images reproduced here there is a fault that when I took my exams cost me marks. That is the positioning of the eyes. I know this article is about lighting but the eyes are an important part of portraits. I was taught that the eyes should face straight ahead no matter where the subject's head is facing. There should not be uneven whites. Of course there are exceptions to every rule.

[wilgk]

Well here I am back again - the most stubborn student ever!
now I'm not about to go and buy any studio lighting - but that is no excuse not to have a go indoors and try some techniques with the equipment to hand...

• inner part of reflector as a diffuser
• speedlight on tripod firing through reflector
• silver side of same reflector
• mini reflector silver side
• big work lamp from 'his' shed
• little work lamp from 'his' shed
• grey card!
• fan

the diffuser suspended with rubber band - it was in front of the flash
oops forgot to say borrowed the drum stool from the friendly VAL's room




as you can see the grey card is essential because the background is cream - I tried the white shower curtain the other day - but it showed the creases and the light seemed to reflect straight off it...so just used the wall today in the hope that the grey card will help me balance all the various light and temperature backgrounds...
(I hear you saying good luck with that!)
This is the image to start with - my aim before the model rushed out with the BF (yep that's another story!) was to learn how to get no or at least very limited shadow on the face - which I haven't mastered here



The final options were the flash through the diffuser
the little work lamp at the background to bounce it's light back at her (you never know the colour of the work lamp bounced at a cream wall might just 'balance' out ok)....ok so I drink diet pepsi with my pizza & I think that's a balance too

Then the VAL held the big work lamp and shone it against the silver reflector which when we got the right angle helped to get rid of the shadow on her face on the side opposite to the flash.

Now missy was in a rush and I was mainly trying to learn how to move lights and reflectors to get rid of shadows on the face....the hair and the pose have slipped to the back burner....and the Big work lamp has helped fill the shadow but as there's no free lunch it has highlighted her hair on the opposite side in a wee bright patch...

I also think I really need to improve my PP skills to go the next step, I know I have CS5 but that was only because it was super cheap to school staff - I have very very limited knowledge of it...yet...so this was processed by following some tips put of Colin's lessons on 1 side of the desk and with Scott Kelby's book open on the other all changes in the RAW editor nothing done in Photoshop itself other than the unsharp mask.
The sharpening looked ok on screen - maybe with image resizing it might have gone too much

but anyway here she is...

[speedneeder]

I tried some work lights too, and couldn't get satisfactory results directly, so your diffuser/reflector approach is probably right on. I recently got a stand, umbrella, and remote trigger/flash, so hopefully I'll have some new entries soon.

[Colin Southern]

How's this Kay?

[wilgk]

much much much better processing - but where's her clothes gone...

[Colin Southern]

much much much better processing - but where's her clothes gone...

I can assure you ma'am that no clothes were removed during the retouching of this portrait!

Seriously, there wasn't anything wrong with the clothers or the crop, but the image needed to be rotated, which then left insufficient margins to support the original crop.

In retrospect it does perhaps look a bit like an implied nude (I'll re-crop if you prefer) - the reason I cropped it at that point was that I thought it better to keep the necklace jewelery intact.

[plankton]

@kay - You are lucky to have a very beutiful model to start with. The last shot is very nice and I'm sure her friends would love it.

However, since we are fellow students of photography here are a few little things that bug me a bit about the final shot:

- The dialated pupils
- I know you said you only ran the unsharpen mask but her face 'looks' a bit too plastic.
- The model's hair needs a brush through to collect some of those wandering strands.

I don't mean to say the shot is not a keeper...it is. Just little things that if corrected would make the shot even better.

Good job.

PS Try keeping the model in the same position, but move the light from camera right to left, then try the light directly over the camera...

Scott

[Colin Southern]

The legend continues with Lesson 7 - Introduction to Gels. See you all there!