Professional studio photography lighting part 3: Camera & lights setup

This is the third part of our Professional studio photography lighting series. Today we pick up where we left off last time (Professional studio photography lighting part 2: Studio portrait photography). Be sure to check the former post before reading any further, to be sure you are able to follow up today =)

So we were talking about how to make use of different photography lighting equipment, how to use and manipulate them the way we want, and we went through some of the most popular & useful lighting techniques for professional studio portrait photography results. Today we will talk about how exactly we would go about setting up all those lights along with our camera to achieve the wanted effects.

Setting up your camera and lights

First of all, you need to make sure that no light spill makes it to your camera lens, by using the deepest lens hood you have available. Light spilling onto the the lens can create flare as a result of light bouncing and reflecting off the lens’ interior elements and onto the sensor, thus reducing scene contrast.

Next you need to make sure all your lights are spill proof. Add flags to any main, fill, background, or rim lights that might cause interference between different parts of your scene, as well as your model and background. Also use barn doors, honeycombs, and focusing spots to contain the spread of light where needed. If your main or fill lights are used with umbrellas, use wide-angle reflectors to direct the light beam into the full width of the umbrellas and prevent light leakage onto other areas of the set.

Balancing model and background lighting

Artificial lighting is usually desirable to be balanced with natural available light. Let’s say you have your model placed in front of a window with light coming through it, while having your model’s back facing the window and their face away from it (facing the camera). If you take your reading off your model’s face towards the camera with an incident light meter, your model will turn out fine but the background will be over-exposed. On the other hand, if you take you meter reading off the background (out the window, with your model not present in the frame) using a reflective light meter or with your SLR’s built-in meter (those are reflective as well), and then take a shot your background will turn out fine but your model will be significantly under-exposed.

What you need to do in such case is, place a reflector in front of your model to catch some of the light coming through the window and bounce it back onto your model for frontal fill. Alternatively, you can add a flash light in front of your model to achieve appropriate exposure on their face. Just make sure that the fill light matches the window light in color (add blue gels if necessary to cool down the warmth if, say, tungsten lights were used).

If you go with a flash frontal fill, you will need to set up the flash exposure according to the background reading. For example, if your camera’s meter indicates a correct exposure for the background at f/9, set your flash to f/9 and take the shot. This way both your model and your background will be correctly exposed. Make sure your camera’s shutter speed doesn’t go above its flash sync speed, or else parts of the frame that did not make it to the flash will turn out dark because of being obscured by the camera’s shutter curtains (for more on flash and camera sync speed, check Introduction to flash photography).

Under-exposing the background

Let’s say you’re shooting for a dramatic effect in which you want the background darker than normal with your model shining out. This is a very nice photography lighting technique that can yield interesting results.

Now before we go any further, I just need to make one point clear (I know this might be getting a bit too technical, but hold on. It will all become second nature very soon): Your flash controls your model, and your camera controls the background. Please keep this in mind at all times, it will make your life so much easier!

What I mean by that is, your model’s exposure is controlled by your flash light. Whatever power your flash is set to supply, will only affect your model. Your background on the other hand, is mainly controlled by your camera settings. You always take your reading off your background with the camera meter (shooting right above your model so they don’t influence your meter reading), and whatever aperture you get from your camera you set it on your flash.

What you need to realize here is that your flash duration will typically always be faster than your camera’s shutter speed (as flash emits light very abruptly that no matter what your camera’s shutter speed is, it will never match it up. Unless you’re using one of those older flash units). So you don’t really care about your flash duration, all you care about is setting it to the correct aperture setting as indicated by your camera off the background. This is why I say: Your flash controls your model, and your camera controls the background.

Now that we’ve established that, we wanna under-expose our background, right?! Since we have the correct aperture set on both the camera and the flash head, all we need to do is ride our shutter speed up. Every time you raise your shutter speed one stop, you under-expose the background by one stop (i.e. you darken your background by one stop). Your model remains intact (correctly exposed, as nothing is being changed as far the flash light is concerned).

So to darken your background by one stop, you ride your shutter speed faster by one stop. To darken your background by two stops, you ride your shutter speed faster by two stops. To darken your background by three stops, you ride your shutter speed faster by three stops. And so on… pretty neat, huh =)

Having read the first and second posts in this series (Professional studio photography lighting part 1: photography lighting equipment, Professional studio photography lighting part 2: Studio portrait photography) along with this one here, you should now be all ready to create your own brilliant professional studio portrait photography images. If you like to share your results with us, please feel free to leave links for us in the comments below. We would definitely love to check them out!

The series is not over yet. Next I’m gonna show you how to create some more cool (and perhaps more complicated, since now I know you can follow up) studio portrait photography lighting setups, to add variation to your style and images, so please do stay tuned…