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Lighting for portrait photography
When you’re a commercial portrait photographer like I am, not all your assignments are of dramatically lit subjects. Sometimes, you’re lighting for portrait photography has to be a little less dramatic than normal and you need to create nice, softly lit portraits for a brochure, and advertisement, or even the web. The challenge is to give the client something that makes them happy, while at the same time, makes you happy too. You have to be careful when lighting for portrait photography. If you light too softly, there isn’t enough shape to make the person appear as three dimensional as possible, but there are times when the client just wants you to lighten up on the shadows…
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The pictures you see below are from a portrait photography shoot for a grocery store chain where we were to use real customers as our portrait subjects. These testimonials were shot in the city where their portraits would be printed in the local newspaper circular. Because they were to be true testimonials, the portrait subjects were not paid any money and everyone that had a good story to quote, was selected regardless of how they looked. As a matter of fact, they were accepted for this testimonial portrait project, sight unseen. And we even went so far as to pluck people right out of the grocery store produce department.
Having said that... I was very pleased with the types of people that showed up for the portrait photography session. I guess the reason that everyone worked out so well is that they were volunteering for the photos and they know what they were getting into.
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In other words, everyone wanted to have their portraits taken. I’ve done quite a few jobs where people were solicited for the portraits by their bosses and they really didn’t want to have their portrait taken. All my subjects for this assignment were very willing and happy to be there.
Lighting for portrait photography setup
The portrait photography lighting setup was pretty simple. Since we needed to reproduce this lighting setup in a couple different cities, I documented the setup so that I could reproduce it exactly as it was for the first shot.
Lighting for portrait photography diagram
The main light was a large soft box set off to one side. With a soft box placed above and behind the camera as a fill. Ok, I WANTED to use another big box as a fill light, but we didn’t bring enough speed rings on location, so we had to use a large umbrella. I know… the illustration says that I used a large box, but have you ever tried to draw an umbrella in Adobe Illustrator?
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It’s beyond my capabilities… :+). For tweakability, I used a large flexfill reflector to kick in a little more or little less fill, depending on the individual. We used a small soft box as a hair light and made sure that light was plugged into its own “bank” on the power pack just incase we ran across some folliclly impaired individuals. (bald guys). The two medium sized soft boxes to each side of the subject were pointed at the background to evenly light the white paper seamless. BTW, the seamless hung strait down and we didn’t need to sweep it because of the crop.
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Lighting for portrait photography setup details
Subject to background distance 10 ft.
Camera to subject distance 12 ft.
Fill to subject distance 15 ft.
Main soft box to subject distance 8 ft.
Main soft box 400 ws
Two background lights 400 ws each
Hair light 100-200 ws
Fill umbrella 200 ws
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Camera Nikon D3
ISO 200
Custom White balance
Shutter 1/125
Aperture F13
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Michael Ray's photography and advertising links
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