Home Studio Portrait Lighting Setup for Beauty Photography

http://SmokingStrobes.com - In this video you will learn about a very flexible portrait lighting setup. It works with a bright background as well as with a dark background. For this lighting setup you only need 3 speedlights and shoot through umbrellas. This lighting setup produces classic beauty portraits like you need for magazine shoots and for skin care advertisements. By balancing the light left and right you can choose how much you want the features of your model stand out or being flattened by even, frontal light. This is one of my favorite lighting setups. Let me know below the video what you think about it.

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I wish you good light!
-- Michael

Hey photography friend! How is it going?

I am Michael Zelbel. I'm still here in Beijng.

Today is my last day. Tomorrow I will be flying back to Germany,

but today I still have one spontaneous shooting with a new model, Amelia,

she just signed up for the model forum three days ago and

I thought she got a wonderful face for a couple of portraits

and that's what we are going to shoot today: some crazy portraits.

It will be very interesting so keep on watching.

This lighting setup will be all about flexibility.

I didn't really plan the shooting, but I know that I just want to do some simple portrait.

But there are so many variations. I dont know the model.

I dont know whether face is better from this side or that side,

which means: Should have my main light coming from the right or from the left?

I don't know whether it's better to have her long black beautiful hair open

and probably place it in front of a black background or whether we should tie it up

and place her in front of a white background, we will try out and learn.

For that I need a really, really flexible setup.

And this is what I am going to do:

I will use two speedlights as my main light sources.

This is speed light A, and I will have the model sitting over here,

and I will have the speedlight a bit higher coming from this side. Like this.

Just above the table at a 45 degrees angle. That's speedlight A.

The same on the other side with speed light B.

The good thing with those speedlights is,

that I can control them from the camera or from the on-camera flash.

I can control which one of those is my main light.

I just have to dial one control and say the ratio is now 2:1,

so two times the amount of light from here and one time the amount from the left.

When I tell her to turn her nose to this side, then I just have to dial

two time the amount of light from here and one time the amount of filling light from over there,

In just on second I can change the position of my main light.

I will shoot from over there to over here.

I need to fill in from below, and for that I just put some white towel ontop of the table.

This will reflect a decent amount of light.

Voilà! Beauty light from all sides and nothing can go wrong.

ETTL - Even I cannot mess it up!

Good, now the background! Over here I have got windows.

I can let down the curtains and then it's a bright background, creamy white.

It's a really bright one, which would need some more light to appear pure white.

Or I want to have it black. Black is very simple.

I've got my big reflector.

I just put it over here, lean it against a chair,

and when I shout from over there, then now I have got a black background.

Since she has got black hair and probably I will have her wearing a black hat,

I will need some head light and for that I will use another little speed light.

I will hang it under the ceiling and zoom it to 105mm,

so it's emitting a very directed beam of light.

I will hang it this way around, right over here so that it will just hit her head over here.

In case I want to have the bright background,

I just have to remove this reflector, turn this speedlight around,

pull out the built in diffuser so that it zooms out to 14 mm.

Then it's emitting a very broad cone of light

to the whole window wall over there.

When I now shoot her against the light,

then this will be brightened by this speedlight.

It's set to group C, so I can control it from the camera.

To brighten up the wall I would probably dial to plus +1, overexpose the wall by one f-stop.

To have just a bit of delineation in the hair I would set it to -3,

to have just a little it of light over here.

It's just a matter of two seconds to change the setup.

Okay, now we can try out lots of things within a few minutes. Let's do so.

There you have it.

Just a little portrait shooting, but with quite some variation.

The speedlights, especially the ETTL element of the speedlights,

was quite helpful. It makes it a whole lot faster.

So I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you have fun with your shoots!

I hope to see you soon!

Until then, I wish you good light!

Bye bye