For this lesson, we wanted to show how you do not necessarily need a lot of lighting equipment to create beautiful, classic portraits. In this lesson, our lighting set-up never extended beyond a soft box and a reflector.

The Main Light with Tungsten
To start, we attached a medium soft box to a continuous lighting unit and placed it off to the side of our model. The nice thing about working with a continuous light is that you can see the effects of the light prior to taking the picture. Here, our subject stood about 10 feet in front of a muslin backdrop, supported by a background support kit (figures 1 & 2).

The reason we had the model so far in front of the backdrop was twofold:

1) We wanted the background to be fairly dark for this portrait. If we had the model stand closer to the backdrop, the light from the main light would have brightened it considerably.

2) We wanted to have the background be soft (out of focus) in order to draw more attention to our subject. Shooting with a wide-open aperture and having some distance between your subject and background will allow you to achieve this look. For a more selective focus look, we decided to attach a Lensbaby 3G specialty lens to the camera. This lens is unique in that it allows you to tilt, shift and lock down your plane of focus and create a very shallow depth of field, similar to that of a large format view camera.

Once the light was where we wanted it, we adjusted the camera settings to the following:

• Exposure Mode: Manual
• Aperture: f/8*
• Shutter Speed: 1/80th of a second
• ISO: 400
• Focus: Manual
• Format: RAW


Once the model was ready, we took our first shot (figure 3).

*The Lensbaby lens comes with various-sized aperture rings that you can physically place on top of the glass lens. As such, you cannot make aperture adjustments through the camera.

As you can see from the result, the effects of the soft box are very similar to that of window light. The features of our subject are rendered softly and naturally, and the backdrop is nicely understated. Not bad for just one light! Also notice how the focus falls of toward the bottom of the frame. This effect is due to the angled lens positioning of the Lensbaby lens.

Reducing Contrast with a Fill Light
Next, we decided to add just a little fill to the shadow side of our subject to minimize the contrast somewhat. We attached a soft gold reflector to a reflector holder and light stand and positioned it on the opposite side of our subject. We then used it to bounce light from the main light into the shadows (figures 4 & 5).

Once the reflector was positioned were we wanted it, we took another shot (figure 6).

The effects of the reflector, although subtle, were just what we were looking for. It bounced just enough light into the shadows to add detail, but not so much that it would detract from the overall mood of the shot. The result is a very classic look with just one light and a reflector.

Mixing Daylight with Tungsten
For the next shot, we wanted to change the look of the background and decided to use a paned window in the room we were shooting in. We moved the soft box and reflector over toward the window, positioned them just as we had in the previous shot and framed up the shot (figures 7 and 8).

Once we found a composition we liked, we took another shot (figure 9).

Notice the lighting effects of this shot. While the light on our subject looks good, just as it did in the previous shot, the light on the background has a color balance issue. Specifically, the daylight coming through the window is very blue. This is because the color temperature of daylight (5500K) is much higher and bluer than that of our Tungsten light (3200K).

The White Balance in the camera here was set to balance for Tungsten lights, which it did with our subject, but with the background, it rendered it too blue. This is a classic example of color imbalance due to mixed lighting conditions.

Switching to Grayscale
One option you have when shooting in mixed light conditions is to shoot in black and white. In a grayscale shooting space, it doesn't matter what the color temperatures are, since you will only be concerned with tones.

In this situation, we changed the color mode in the camera to Monotone (grayscale) and took another series of shots (figure 10).

This one ended up being one of our favorites (figure 11).

Balancing with Daylight
But let's say that you want to shoot the scene in color. What do you do? Well, the easiest way to balance color in this scenario is to change out the Tungsten lamp with a daylight-balanced lamp. And that's just what we did here (figure 12).

With our main light now at the same color temperature as the light coming through the window (roughly 5500K), we changed the White Balance in the camera to Daylight (also 5500K). This ensured that every element of the frame was color-balanced.

Once our main light was powered up, we took our final series of shots (figures 13 & 14).

The result below ended up being one of our favorites of this series. Notice how the daylight lamp has rendered beautiful skin tones and that it balances perfectly with the light coming through the rear window (figure 15).

With the right lighting and camera gear, and a little know-how, you can create beautiful, natural looking portraits with ease. Remember to experiment with your gear and techniques, and above all, have fun!