Three Portrait Lighting Styles You Must Try!

Need a few ideas for improving your portraits? Follow myself and Audrey through Downtown Salt Lake City, UT as we show three methods for taking great portraits. It's ok if you don't have professional lighting equipment; these concepts can work using a lot of things you already have. Get creative and see if you can use the concepts we share in this video to create your own great portraits!

(First attempt making a video like this. We know we can improve and would love to hear your thoughts. What would you like to see us try next? What could we do better? Please let us know in the comments!)

Method 1: Natural Light

The key to good portraiture is always being in control of your light. At a bare minimum you need a reflector to do this. In a pinch you can pick up a large sheet of foam-core board for really cheap; but we prefer using Lastolite's large tear drop shaped reflectors for their convenience and durability.

Notice how dark our model Sasha's eyes are before placing the reflector underneath her chin. You can see how the reflector fills in her face and adds light to her eyes.

Using Directional Light

To give our model more dimension in this next shot, we'll continue using the same technique with the reflector but add light over her right side by facing her back to the sun. In your own shots, play around with the angle. Try to keep direct sunlight off your subjects face to avoid strange shadows. Use a reflector to redirect light back onto your subject's face.

Method 2: Single Flash

For this second technique, we'll put away the reflector and instead add a flash. A flash is a device that can produce a very bright light for an instant; literally a flash. Placing a flash overhead and pointing down at your subject at a 45-degree angle gives faces dimension and dramatic lines. This style is best for creating stronger or more intense looking portraits. The flash we are using here is a Godox AD200 with an attached reflector dish. We attached our flash to our light-stand using a Phottix Cerberus with a bowens mount and a Manfrotto umbrella adapter. There are cheaper stand-adapters on amazon; but trust us, NONE of them are worth buying. Buy the manfrotto. It's built like a rock and you'll never need to replace it.

We HIGHLY recommend starting with Godox flashes. All their flashes have built in remote functionality, which is just unheard of in similarly priced products. You can pick up one of Godox's basic flashes and a remote for around a hundred dollars.

Here are a few examples without the flash vs with the flash:

Method 3: Fill and Kick

In this last method we use a large 36 inch Octabox like this one by Westcott (we prefer Westcott Softboxes because of their build quality and quick assembly) attached to our 600 watt Godox AD600pro. Large soft boxes like this one fitted with a powerful flash make for a great directional key light that fills in features while still producing soft shadows.

To create contrasting lines and cut our subject out of the background a little more, we took our key light from method 2, a bare flash with a reflector dish, and placed it behind our model. When used this way, the light is called a hair light or a kicker light. You could also just use a basic flash pointed at your subject. Using a kicker light adds a glowing edge to the subject and really helps separate them from the background.

Stepping up to this light setup is a little pricey. If you're not ready to purchase studio lights, but would like to play around with studio lighting, look up studio rentals near you. For usually less than $100 you can have access to some top tier lighting equipment and a studio for a couple hours.

Image left, no kicker. Image right, kicker added.

Can you spot the image that doesn't have a kicker light?

Thank you for checking out today's post. We hope this will help you take your own great portraits. If you have questions, or if you'd like to share feedback please feel free to contact us or post your comments below. Also, consider joining our mailing list for future updates on PushCapture Blog posts and promotions.

See you next time!

(answer: bottom right)