Need some Portrait Help

[dennykyser]

Can you guys give me your ligthing set up. How do you do the hair light or background light?

I realize I need a fill, main and a backlight or hairlight but do you use barndoors for that or what. Do you use a boom or regular lightstand?

[DaveG]

Can you guys give me your ligthing set up. How do you do the hair light or background light?

I realize I need a fill, main and a backlight or hairlight but do you use barndoors for that or what. Do you use a boom or regular lightstand?

DON'T even think about using real lights. They are hot and extremely dangerous. They are also very weak compared to strobe lighting.

You start with a main light (and light means strobe throughout this text). I'd suggest that you have it bounced into an umbrella or through a soft box. An umbrella will be a lot cheaper than a soft box, and more easily set up. You can put this light anywhere you want but roughly 45 degrees to the subject is normal. You need to do an exposure reading of the flash at this point so you'll need a flash meter. You could get the correct exposure by trial and error with your digital camera's histogram but it won't help you with lighting ratios so a flash meter is needed.

Then you set up a second light which will be your fill light. You MUST set up this second light within 20 degrees of your camera position. Adjust the power on the fill until it just about 1 stop less than the main light. Without going into the theory "just shy of a stop" has given you a 3:1 lighting ratio, which is a nice typical portrait lighting ratio.

Measure the main and the fill individually while you are setting up the lights. This may mean swapping the synch cord back and forth a bit but that's the way that you do it. I'm going to assume that one of the two flashes have a light slave so that the first flash, which is triggered by a synch cord, will fire the second. Of course any additional flashes will need slaves too.

After you've established your lighting ratio you'll need to do another meter reading with both flashes on. There is such limited latitude with digital exposures that you'll have to expose at the combination of both main and fill. (Main f8, fill f5.6, together f8 & a half, ish.) My point is that with colour neg film it would hardly matter. But with digital capture or colour transparency film, it's critical.

If you use monolights they almost certainly will have modeling lights which will help you focus and will also indicate lighting problems (reflections in glasses types of things) while you are looking through the camera. The review in the digital camera is good but it's always nicer to just say, "Just lower your head a tiny bit. There, we have it." than have to check and reshoot.

Try a test shot and check your histogram. Bias the exposure now as you see fit. The flash meter is critical for setting up your lighting ratios but the histogram will give you better exposure control.

You probably noticed that I haven't mentioned the hair light or the background light. The things is that you have to get main and fill out of the way first. For the hair light you could use an optically slaved hotshoe flash like a Vivitar 283/285. Build a snoot out of something to direct the light. When I was at university one guy took a plastic cup, cut the bottom out, sprayed it with black paint and stuck that over a flash! I usually would have this light set up on a light stand. You could use a boom but they tend to get in the way.

If your hair light is another strobe make sure that any snoot you use is heat resistent since that modeling light can get hot if its air circulation gets cut off.

For the exposure of the hair light it almost doesn't matter. I'd say at least one full stop over the combined main/fill exposure. There won't be any detail in the hair light area since you'll blow it out, and that's OK.

The background light is usually set low behind the subject. That way you can feather it from bright directly behind the subject's shoulders to almost nothing as the light moves up to the subject's head. This you'll have to play with. The exposure for this is tricky because the colour and the material of the backdrop is going affect what the exposure looks like. A friend used a green velvet backdrop once and he had to dump tons of light into it and it STILL photographed black. I'd set up the background light at the same power as the combined main/fill and then I'd try it. After review I could always increase or decrease the flash's power as needed.

Now none of this comes cheap. You'll need at least two strobes, stands for all the lights, plus a couple of umbrellas, a flash meter, a background (plus supports) and even a stool. But you asked how to do it, so there you go.

[dennykyser]

Again thanks for the help and this was exactly the kind of response I was hoping for.

So your saying I can use a strobe on an normal stand, would you sugest a snoot, barndoors or a honeycomb grid to throw the light on the hair.

I have very limited space so the background light will be hard thats why I am shooting for a hair light.

[tracyh]

Thanks DaveG--
This is helpful for me, too. I've just gotten my "studio" set up for portraits, and it sounds like I'm on the right track. I've got an ST-E2 mounted on camera, with a 550ex bounced into an umbrella as the main light (45 degrees to the left of the subject), and a 420ex flash also bounced into an umbrella as the fill... but I have that set up almost 90 degrees to the right of the subject rather than next to the camera. I've got the ratio set at 8:1. I also have a background light (not a strobe) and a hairlight with snoot on a boom stand. Just wondering if where I have the fill set up is "acceptable"? So far, this seems to look pretty good, but I'm pretty new at this.
As far as Dennykyser's original question about the hairlight... I ended up buying a nice photogenic monolight that has a modeling light that is triggered by my flash. This seems to work great... but it is pretty heavy for the boom stand... to the point that it makes me nervous. I've got counterweight on the stand, but I believe I'll need more to feel secure. If you have limited space, be aware that the boomstand setup does tend to take up a fair amount of room. A note on the background light... I just bought a "clip-on" work light and clip it to the bottom rung of the posing stool. This works great and doesn't take up much room. I use a low enough wattage so that it's not too bright being close to the background like that.
Thanks, Holly

[DaveG]

Thanks DaveG--
This is helpful for me, too. I've just gotten my "studio" set up for portraits, and it sounds like I'm on the right track. I've got an ST-E2 mounted on camera, with a 550ex bounced into an umbrella as the main light (45 degrees to the left of the subject), and a 420ex flash also bounced into an umbrella as the fill... but I have that set up almost 90 degrees to the right of the subject rather than next to the camera. I've got the ratio set at 8:1. I also have a background light (not a strobe) and a hairlight with snoot on a boom stand. Just wondering if where I have the fill set up is "acceptable"? So far, this seems to look pretty good, but I'm pretty new at this.
As far as Dennykyser's original question about the hairlight... I ended up buying a nice photogenic monolight that has a modeling light that is triggered by my flash. This seems to work great... but it is pretty heavy for the boom stand... to the point that it makes me nervous. I've got counterweight on the stand, but I believe I'll need more to feel secure. If you have limited space, be aware that the boomstand setup does tend to take up a fair amount of room. A note on the background light... I just bought a "clip-on" work light and clip it to the bottom rung of the posing stool. This works great and doesn't take up much room. I use a low enough wattage so that it's not too bright being close to the background like that.
Thanks, Holly

"I've got an ST-E2 mounted on camera, with a 550ex bounced into an umbrella as the main light (45 degrees to the left of the subject), and a 420ex flash also bounced into an umbrella as the fill... but I have that set up almost 90 degrees to the right of the subject rather than next to the camera."

Then that's NOT a fill light. The principle of fill is that its light hits BOTH sides of the subject's face, and that's where the 20 degrees comes from. At 90 degrees it's just another light. There's no way that that 90 degree light can get anything onto the far side so how does it fill?

As far as the indicated lighting ratios on Canon wireless TTL, they may have nothing to do with the true output and therefore true lighting ratio. I use a 550 as a Master with a 420 in the slave position. The 550 is on a bracket above the camera so it's the fill. The 420 can be anywhere I put it an it becomes the main. I change the ratios set up until I get something I like but I wonder how accurate the ratios are.

[DaveG]

Again thanks for the help and this was exactly the kind of response I was hoping for.

So your saying I can use a strobe on an normal stand, would you sugest a snoot, barndoors or a honeycomb grid to throw the light on the hair.

I have very limited space so the background light will be hard thats why I am shooting for a hair light.

Yes you really need a snoot of some kind to concentrate the hair light. It shouldn't spill onto the subject's cheek or shoulder - unless you want it to. It also needs to be suitably snooted so the snoot acts like a flag to prevent flare. The position of the hair light is above the subject and behind them to one side, so flare is a very real possiblity.

[tracyh]

Thanks DaveG,
I guess I always thought of "fill" as the light that would fill in the "other" side of the subject... so if I had the main light 45 degrees to the subject, hitting more on one side of the face than the other, that the fill would be set such that it hit the other side. I never thought of it as needing to fill both sides of the subject. Perhaps it stems from, up til now, using one main light and a reflector board.... since I always had the reflector board at 90 degrees to catch the main light and bounce the light back onto the subject on the opposite side.

[DaveG]

Thanks DaveG,
I guess I always thought of "fill" as the light that would fill in the "other" side of the subject... so if I had the main light 45 degrees to the subject, hitting more on one side of the face than the other, that the fill would be set such that it hit the other side. I never thought of it as needing to fill both sides of the subject. Perhaps it stems from, up til now, using one main light and a reflector board.... since I always had the reflector board at 90 degrees to catch the main light and bounce the light back onto the subject on the opposite side.

Yeah the idea of fill is to have one side brighter than the other (the main or as some people call it, the KEY light) But then you want to have some light in the shadow (the fill) and the greater the contrast between the main and the fill creates the ratio. That almost one stop I suggested is 3:1. If it was a stop and 1/3 the ratio will be higher 4:1, 5:1 and so forth.

If you use a higher ratio (and with digital why not try it to see?) make sure that you bias your exposure for the highlight. The shadow will go black and that's not necessarily good but if you blow out the highlights you'll have nothing. The higher the ratio the more dramatic the image and while that's good for moody portraits and such, it really sucks if you are just trying to do a business portrait for an newspaper announcement!

The other thing about lighting a person or a product is that the media MUST be able to handle the highlights and shadows. That's why it's so important that you don't exceed that latitude for conventional assignments. In View Camera Magazine a few years ago an author explained how he made his client's production people overwhelmingly happy after he started to establish a fairly close highlight/shadow relationship when he was shooting product beauty shots.

Before, he just lit the thing and while it looked fine on his transparency the production people - who were trying to make a colour separations - were pulling their hair out since they couldn't hold the shadow and the highlight at the same time. His highlights may well have been a couple or three stops hotter than the shadows, and while he was happy with the dark shadows the production people weren't. He narrowed it down (and I don't remember how close the highlight/shadow f-stop range became), he stayed happy and the production people - and therefore the clients - were estatic!