Make lights work for you | Professional Portraits studio setup

Lighting is one of the most important tools for creative portraiture. The way you arrange your illumination can have a dramatic effect on the mood of a photo. Lighting can focus interest on your subject. You can even use lighting techniques to improve the looks of a subject with less-than-perfect features. You'll find that portrait lighting is a great deal more complex than the lighting you might use for many other types of subjects. Close-ups need to be lit carefully, and your scenic and architectural pictures will look better if the illumination is just so. For sports photography, much of the time you won't even have much control over the kind of light you use. Portraiture, on the other hand, looks best when the lighting is carefully crafted.

As a result, while very good portraits can be taken with just one light source, you'll find that mastering multiple light sources opens new creative avenues. But note that I said multiple light sources. You don't have to encumber your home or office studio with dozens of different lighting fixtures. Often, a skylight, window, or reflector can serve as an effective light source. Outdoors, you may work with the light from the sun, supplemented by reflectors or electronic flash. 

Here are your choices:

Existing Light

The existing light indoors or outdoors can be perfect for good people pictures. Rembrandt reportedly cut a trapdoor in the ceiling of his studio and used that to illuminate many of his portraits. If you have a room with a skylight, you may find that suitable for portraits at certain times of day. Some memorable pictures have been taken using only the soft light that suffuses from a window. Indeed, you'll find references to "north light" (a window orientation that produces diffuse light from dawn to dusk) throughout painting and photographic literature.

Just because the lighting is already there doesn't mean you can't modify it to your advantage. You can lower the blinds part way to reduce or soften window light. You can use reflectors to bounce light around in interesting ways.

Electronic Flash

Electronic flash is often the best choice for indoor portraiture. The short duration of flash captures a moment in a fraction of a second, without danger of blur from a slow shutter speed. The high intensity of flash means you can use small f-stops if you want, so all of your subject will be in sharp focus. Flash can be reduced in intensity, as well, giving you the option of using selective focus, too. Flash can be harsh and direct, or soft and diffuse.

The chief problem with electronic flash is that it is difficult to preview how flash illumination will appear in the final picture. Fortunately, there are ways to overcome this limitation. A second problem is that many digital cameras don't have a connector that lets you plug in an external flash.

Electronic flash comes in many forms, from the built-in flash on your digital camera to external battery-powered units to "studio" flash that operate from AC power or large battery packs. Unless you're moving into portraiture in a big way, you don't need studio flash units. If you do decide to make the investment, there are some surprisingly economical AC-powered studio flash setups for serious amateurs and pros on a budget. A single-unit (flash head and power supply in one module) "monolite" can cost less than $200.

You certainly should investigate external battery-powered flashes that are compatible with your digital camera. Many digital cameras cannot use electronic flash intended for film cameras, because conventional flash units use a voltage to trigger the flash (through a switch in the camera) that is too high, and likely to fry the electronics of a digital model. Digital cameras may also work only with dedicated external flash units that integrate with the camera's exposure system. Unless you have such a dedicated flash, you'll want a digital camera that has manual exposure settings that can be used with any external flash unit.

Some add-on flash units have a built-in device called a slave sensor that triggers the flash when the sensor detects another unit firing. These can be safely used with any camera, as they have no direct connection to the camera. You can also purchase detectors that attach to any flash unit, turning it into a slave flash.

If you're using an external flash, make sure you turn off your digital camera's internal flash unit, especially if you don't want it to trigger a slave unit. Some digital camera models require you to have the internal flash flipped up, even if disabled, to activate the external flash connector. Check your camera's instruction manual carefully to see exactly what you need to do to use an external flash unit.

If you use your electronic flash on stands, you may be able to rig an incandescent light along each side to give you some indication of what your lighting looks like. These "modeling" lights work especially well if your electronic flash is pointed at a reflector such as an umbrella. That's because the softening effect of the umbrella reduces the variation in illumination that results when the flash and incandescent lamp aren't in precisely the same position.

Incandescent Lights

You'll find that incandescent lights are inexpensive, easy to set up, and make it simple to preview your lighting effects. You never have to worry about what your lighting will look like if you use incandescent lamps.

Unfortunately, lamps are not as intense as flash and may not provide enough illumination for good handheld exposures at short shutter speeds. Or, if the lamps are intense enough, they may be too hot to pose under for long periods of time. In addition, incandescent lamps are much redder than the illumination provided by daylight or electronic flash, so you may have to change your camera's whitebalance control to compensate. (Many digital models have automatic white-balance control, but it's not foolproof.)

While you can use just about any light, you might want to investigate incandescent lamps made especially for photography, available from your local camera shop or online photo retailer. They aren't overly expensive, and are easier to buy hardware for, such as mounting clamps, umbrella adapters, and so forth.

Learn family, senior, infants, baby, pets portraits, portraits poses, lighting, outdoor, black and white portrait photography