Your Simplest Way to Improve Your Lighting
/As a practitioner of the art of lighting, I will always want to maximize the return of whatever set up I have access to for a particular image. In this article we will work on a headshot for our subject Mike.
Our equipment is what any of us could easily have in a portable headshot setup, such as we are doing for friends or family.
Setup
The background is just a roll of background paper on a tray on a stand. For this example, I have used a champagne coloured background to go with Mike’s hair and skin. The background light is just a normal speed light on a stand with no modifiers and as is, pointed at the background to hit behind Mike’s head and ensuring not to put any light on him. I did this because I like a background light, but if you only have one flash, I will show you the difference without and with a background light.
The camera is mounted on a tripod using my normal 70-200 lens at about 180mm f/5.6 at 1/250th of a second shutter speed, with ISO 100. Again, very general settings, no special kit required.
The main light is a speed light in a light stand with a 24” square soft box with both inner and outer diffusers installed. This is a very common and inexpensive option for the speed light user. It is set about 35 degrees off centre, camera left because flat light is boring. It is level with his head and aimed at his face.
First Image
In this first image, you see the shot of Mike exactly as described above, but without the background light, because not everyone has two speed lights, although with Godox TT685ii units being so good and so inexpensive, having a couple of speed lights is not bank breaking. I make the point to recommend these because I have used them in production, they are excellent, inexpensive and include radio receivers in the units. You will need a radio transmitter for your camera, anytime you want to use off camera flash. Here’s a link to the companion unit, the Godox XPro I and Godox XPro II transmitters. Either is fine, the II series is newer and a bit more expensive.
Anyway, back to the image of Mike with one off camera flash in the 24” x 24” soft box.
There’s nothing wrong with this shot but I think we can spruce it up. So in this image, I just added a background flash and adjusted the output until I liked what I got. For all those who are fearful of or uncomfortable with TTL, I used manual flash settings for all these images.
Second Image
The only change in this image is adding the second speed light to light the background. The nice thing about doing this is that once you know what the background looks like without a light (Image 1), you add the light and set the output until you achieve a look that you do like.
But how do we make this richer and more powerful without complicating things with another speed light and then worrying needlessly about lighting ratios and additional light shapers? Let’s see
Third Image
In this third image, I turned off the background speed light so you can focus on the change on the left side of Mike’s face. This “fill” is done with a 3’ silver reflector. Nothing more. You can put one on a stand with a simple clamp, or have someone hold it for you. As I tend to work solo, I used a cheap light stand to go with the cheap reflector like the one in this Impact kit. These kits are very inexpensive and contain a number of surfaces. Having done this kind of work for decades, most of these colours are pretty useless. You need silver, white is helpful and black is awesome when you want to suck light away from something. The green and the blue are for video keying only, never for photography because they colour the subject and the gold just gives everyone jaundice and does particularly horrible things to folks with darker skin. Only use gold if you want the image to be awful and you want to really insult your subject.
The closer you move the reflector to the subject the softer and brighter the reflection. Don’t change the output on the speed light once you are happy, just move the reflector. For this image and image 4 it is about 18 inches away from Mike’s left side with a slight angle towards the main speed light. This is why I like a stand because small movements can create great changes, however a voice activated light stand also works well. (A VAL is your human assistant).
Fourth Image
Now let’s bring back the background light now that we are happy with this incredibly simple light set up on Mike.
And BOOM! We’re done. The use of the reflector fills in the heavier shadows seen in images 1 and 2 but not so much as to make the overall lighting flat. Remember flat light on faces is boring and real amateur hour stuff and that’s not you. You also don’t end up with two catchlights in the eyes, which tend to subliminally freak out viewers. The use of the off centre main speed light and reflector creates dimension to the subject’s face making it pop a bit
I noted earlier that I used a chardonnay paper roll. It is specifically Colorama #08 Chardonnay. If you cannot get Colorama paper where you are, Savage 19 Egg Nog is pretty darn close. It’s nicer than white which requires a lot of fussing to get to show as white, and neutral grey subliminally says that the subject is also drab and boring. If you want a nice portable paper roll holder, this Savage unit will do the job. By the way, as I want to be mobile and carry the background roll to locations, I stick with the 53” wide rolls which can handle two people side by side and four if you put two kids in front.
Wrap Up
There is nothing difficult about extending your lighting capability with a reflector. As you can plainly see from the sample images, adding a reflector changes the image and negates the need for a second light. They fold up compactly, and are very transportable. Unless you are doing half and full body work, you don’t need anything bigger than 3 feet in diameter and that will fold up to a pack about 12” in diameter. If you can only get one, get silver, as it has more reflectance than white, but delivers the same colour temperature. A human helper is great but if you are a solo act like me, a cheap stand and a clamp, or even gaffer tape will get the job done.
Thanks for reading. If you have questions, click the link to send an email and please leave a comment if you found this useful. If you shop at B&H Photo Video, please use the link on the site. It pays me a small commission and costs you nothing extra. Until next time, peace.
