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Portrait Lighting

In photography, like in everything else there are rules. I like rules. After you learn to follow them, you gain technique, then you'll know and feel when's the right moment to brake the rules and achieve beautiful, creative and unique results.

In portraiture, there are five types of lighting techniques. In this tutorial I'm going to describe the lighting setups and the results for each of them.

Keep in mind, the setups, described here, are just one of many ways to achieve the same results. Depending on the equipment/studio/subject you use there are different arrangements and workflows. These are the lighting schemes I used. Manipulating the relative position of the Main Light, Fill Light, Model and The Camera depending which side of the face is more exposed to the camera and how it's illuminated, you can obtain different portraits.

ImageThe Main Light (Key Light): This is the dominant light source, it creates the subject's main illumination and defines the most visible lighting and shadows. I used a continuos halogen light reflected from a silver umbrella, so I would have a relatively harsh light.

The Fill Light: It's used to make more of the subject visible. It also makes the shadows casted from the main light softer. It's lower, and dimmer then the Key Light. Depending on the result you're looking for you need to change the Key to Fill ratio. For this tutorial I used a halogen light with a shoot-thru umbrella, about half as bright as the key.

Broad Portrait Lighting: is obtained by illuminating the most exposed side of the face with the Main Light. For Portrait 1, as you can see in pic 1, I asked the model to turn her face a bit away from the Main Light. So the basic rule is: The model's nose should be facing the opposite side of the camera from which the main light is coming from.
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Portrait 1
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Pic 1


Short Portrait Lighting: is when the main light is on the less exposed part of the face. In Portrait 2, we obtained this by asking the model to turn her face toward the main light. So in pic 2, pic 3 we see that the models nose is facing the same side of the camera from which the main light is coming from.
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Portrait 2
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Pic 2


Rembrandt Portrait Lighting: is a short portrait lighting, where the shadow from the nose connects with the shadow on the side of the face. This way, as you can see in Portrait 3 a triangle of light is created on the cheek. The result is obtained with the light setup for Short Portrait Lighting, you just need to make small adjustments of the face and main light position.
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Portrait 3
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Pic 3


Split Portrait Lighting: The main light illuminates only half of the face. Portrait 4 is obtained by moving the main light far off to the side of the subject (pic 4). Regardless where the nose is pointing, as long as half of the face is lit, this is Split Portrait Lighting.
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Portrait 4
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Pic 4


Butterfly Portrait Lighting: A glamour style of lighting achieved when, the main light is creating a butterfly like shadow directly under and in line with the nose. Portrait 5 is obtained by positioning the main light directly in front and slightly higher then the subject. And as you can see in pic 5 and pic 6 the light is about 45 degrees from the camera/subject axis.
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Portrait 5
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Pic 5
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Pic 6


These are 5 commonly used lighting techniques for portraiture. You don't have to strictly follow these rules, and use these schemes. They are just the baselines. You can use any equipment, even use natural sources of lighting. Try to experiment. For each subject and scenario try different things, be creative and find the lighting effect that suits best.
 
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