A fairly typical three point studio lighting setup

For this article I needed a studio and the assistance of a full time studio photographer, so I turned to local professional Karl Leopold at ImagesForever.net down in Melbourne Beach, FL. Karl was gracious enough to help out with this article and lend his expertise.

Three point lighting is one of the basics of good portrait photography. The components are fairly simple, but the application can take a lifetime to learn.

Our gear:

A key light – Usually a softbox or umbrella. For this shoot we used an Alien Bees 800 in a Fomex rectangular soft box

A fill light – Our fill is an Alien Bees 800 in a 48 inch Octodome

A hair light – The hair light is an Ultra 1800 fitted with a grid screen on a boom

Throughout the shoot we used only a single modeling light on the Fomex soft box.

First we used a light meter to verify we were hitting f/11 at the subject, then we maintained a consistent distance to the subject the old-fashioned way, with a string to the center of the key soft box.

All the lights are on PocketWizard Plus remotes and the transmitter on my Canon 7D was a PocketWizard MiniTTL. The lens was a stock Canon 28-135mm zoom set my closest eyeball approximation to 85mm.

All camera settings were manual unless otherwise stated, we used 1/125 of second for a shutter speed through the entire series.

I did minimal post processing adjustments on the pictures so you can see the difference in the lighting. Standard color correction and cropping is all that was done.

This is a key light only approximately 10 degrees off the camera axis. Not bad, maybe a little flat

Our basic set up was Rembrandt lighting at a 3:1 ratio between the key and the fill, more about lighting ratios and lighting styles in a future article.

The three photos that follow are Key only, Key plus Fill, and then Key, Fill and Hair Light. Observe how the character of lighting changes as each additional light is added.

See what a difference adding the fill makes?

Key, plus fill and the addition of the hair light which also helps separate the white jacket from the background. Because we had a hair light we were able to use a 5:1 ratio instead of 3:1

• Basic Five Point Studio Lighting (1)
• Studio Lighting (0)
• Your Photography Studio (0)