Basic Portrait Lighting

While there are no hard statistics to track the kind of photographs people take, it’s safe to assume that bulk of the photos we take are portraits. Whether the portraits taken are snapshots, formally posed, group shots, or self-taken, portraits are probably the main reason why we purchased our cameras. The portrait helps us remember those who are important, valuable, admire, and influence our personal lives. While the subject and moment captured is often the most important element of a portrait, knowing how to use light, posing, and composition to our advantage will transform a snapshot to a polished portrait that will convey not only who is in the photo, but what the photographer saw and felt when the photograph was taken.

Snapshot versus Portraits

The line between a snapshot and a portrait is a thin one, and neither one is better than the other if we based the photo on the intent of the photographer. A snapshot portrait is not automatically an inferior photo, a snapshot simply means the photograph was a captured moment without pre-planning or setup. A portrait, on the other hand, is a photograph where some level of planning was made prior to the capture of the person’s photograph. An example of a “planned” photo would range from small details such as moving the subject to a better light location, applying make-up or combing hair before the shot, or more elaborate preparation such as using lights or light modifiers, and so forth. In this series of articles, we will concentrate on lighting. We will discuss the basic lighting patterns and how it affects the subjects to how to utilize and control available light to replicate some basic light patterns to create a solid portrait.

Direction of Light

The direction of light can enhance, highlight, or conceal a person’s features in both positive and negative manner. The light can come from any angle from three dimensions and each shift will result to a different effect on our subject. Let’s tackle the simple and common angles and see how each light appears.

Frontal

Frontal light is most commonly seen when an on-camera flash is fired directly at the subject. The light is on the same axis as the lens, that means the highlight would be in front of the subject and the shadows would fall off behind the subject.

Frontal flash is often avoided as the light hits the subject’s face with identical intensity, making the subject’s facial features flat as no shadows are formed around the nose, cheeks, chin, and other facial contours. The lack of shadows is commonly known as “flat” lighting as it lacks depth and reveals very little texture and contour.

Side Lighting

Side lighting is the most common form of “angled” light, where the light is coming from a different axis from the lens. Side lighting reveals forms, shadows, contours, and creates contrast between highlight and shadows.

Side lighting can be angled in many angles resulting to different areas of highlight and shadows, in the example above, we used a 90-degree side light. That means that the subject is placed right beside the light source, creating a distinct bright-to-dark image from left-to-right. Traditionally, a 45-degree side light is commonly used, this occurs when the sun is nearing the horizon as well as the most basic studio lighting position.

Backlight

Backlight creates silhouettes, the light creates highlights in areas that is not visible by the camera lens as the subject itself obscures the light, causing only the shadows and outline to appear. Oftentimes, a backlit image shows off the overall form and shape with high contrast between the subject and the bright background. An eclipse is a very basic form of backlit scenario. Backlight can also be used as a separator between the subject and the background, especially if the color of the background is similar to the subject’s clothes or hair.

Standard Lighting for Portraits

The standard lighting for portraits, assuming we only have a single light source (such as the sun), is to position the subject so that the light will illuminate the face at a 45-degree angle, slightly above the subject. This basic lighting setup works for most faces as the angle of the light provides shadows that allows facial patterns to appear distinct from one another. The shadows around the nose, eyelids, lips, and chin areas gives the photo depth and dimension. The standard lighting setup can be controlled further by adding auxiliary light sources creating what is called the basic studio portrait light. This standard three-light setup consists of a key light, the fill light, and the back light. The key light is the main light. This is the light that will illuminate most of the subject and will be responsible for the overall exposure of the photograph. All other lights that a photographer may use will be based on the exposure of the key light.

A single key light positioned at the right angle will produce a nice lighting pattern that shows both highlights and shadows distinctively and creates a three-dimensional feel to the image. The second light is the fill light. The fill light’s responsibility is to lift the shadows and reduce contrast created by the key light. The brighter the fill, the lesser the contrast of the overall image.The fill light should always illuminate less than the key light, otherwise, the fill light will act as a main light.

In Figure 4, we used a reflector to reduce the contrast of the image by lightening the shadows on the subject’s left cheek. The fill light reduced the shadows but still has a lower brightness than the main light. In addition, the details around the subject’s left ear and hair areas are revealed with this fill light. Note that the fill light does not have to be an actual light source (powered bulb), in this case, we only used a white reflector to reflect the light coming from our key light. A cheap, 3-ft white foam board was used in this instance. The back light provides separation between the subject and the background, especially if the two have similar tonality. A background helps separate dark hair from a dark background, for example.

Notice that our first two examples in Figures 3 and 4 have dark backgrounds, by adding another light behind the subject, we illuminated the background and separated the dark hair from the grey background instantly. A back light can either illuminate the background itself, as shown above, or provide a rim light or hair light to separate the subject from the background. Combining the three lights often guarantees a portrait with good depth, dimension, and isolation that draws the viewer to the subject’s best features. It is not required to always have three light sources to create good portraits, oftentimes, a well-planned single light source is all it takes for an excellent portrait. This concludes the basic portrait lighting components, in our next article we will discuss the different standard lighting techniques for portraits.

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