Lighting in Portrait Photography

Portrait Photographer Wakefield

A photographer I follow on twitter recently tweeted about a sort of lighting mega resource in a post called 20 Resources that will get you lit. I have only glanced at it but there seems to be a load of great links to anything related to lighting, well worth a look. So with this in mind I thought I would post a shot from a recent portrait photography shoot I did in my studio in Wakefield. We usually use a clean white background to provide the modern high key type look which works really well but I like to try and mix things up from time to time.

In this shot I switched to my grey backdrop (used in a recent post about coloured backgrounds) and positioned the light in front of the model, so 90 degrees to camera right. The light was a large softbox positioned quite high pointing down at the subject – See diagram. Not an elaborate lighting set up by any means but sometimes less is more. As for settings my camera was set to f/8 ISO100, 1/160 at 46mm. My light (a 500 WS) was at about quarter power, although I can’t quite remember and it was about 3 feet away.

Lighting Diagram used in the black and white photograph above

Light levels are easy enough to check on the cameras histogram, with a low key shot like this, if you check your LCD and it’s a blown out white mess, the kind you’d get it you photographed an A-Bomb going off, the chances are your lights are a bit overpowered and need turning down.