This article is part of the ‘Portrait Lighting For Beginners’ series. This series is meant to help you go from a beginning photographer to making beautiful portraits.

Why start with just one light? Because you can get amazing portraits, that’s why. Did I mention less equipment, less complication, less cost, and less time? Oh, and once you’ve mastered portraits with a single light, using more lights is pure gravy. I have lots of lighting, but I break out a single light more often than I get out multiples. Many of you reading this have yet to really get into this lighting stuff, so you probably only have one flash. So it makes sense that the first article where we get into lighting setups would focus on portraits with just a single light.

The first thing you should do is read Metering For Flash if you haven’t already done so. This will teach you the process for getting the exposure right with the flash and camera in manual mode.

What Look Do You Want?

The first thing to do before taking a picture is decide how you want the lighting to look. In Studio Accessories you learned about some of the light modifiers available to help you change the quality of the light. So decide right now if you want the light on the subject to be hard with sharp transitions to shadows, or soft and supple.

• For a hard look, you’ll want to simply point the flash directly at the subject.
• For a soft look, you can use an umbrella, softbox, brolly box, scrim, or even point the flash at a nearby wall and turn the wall into a big light source.
• Just remember, the larger the light source appears, the softer the light will be.

Light Position

Next you want to figure out where to put the light. There are a few things to keep in mind here.

• The angle will of course very much change the look of the shot and determine how much of the subject is lit versus in shadow. Experiment like crazy to see what you like best.
• The distance between the light and the subject will affect how much light reaches the background. This is explained in The Laws of Light. Basically, if you want a darker background, you’ll want to keep the light close to the subject. If you want to lighten the background, you’ll need to move the light further from the subject.
• Moving the light further away makes the light source appear smaller to the subject, and so the light will become harder. Moving the light source closer will do the opposite, making the light softer.
• All these things work in concert. Making any one change affects the others, so experiment to see how moving the light around changes the look of your photos.

Filling In The Shadows and Adding Accents

As a beginner, it’s easy to think that with one light you can only make the light fall on the subject from one direction. Not so with a little creative thinking. With that one light you can fill in the shadows, add hair lights, and more. Your primary weapon to start with is the reflector. If you don’t own a store bought one, you can make one. A few household items come to mind:

Foil placed camera right

• Grab that reflective windshield sunshade from your car. Those make great reflectors.
• Find a white cardboard box. Cut it apart to get large white surfaces to reflect light.
• Make a reflector out of aluminum foil and cardboard. Glue it or tape it to the cardboard to make a nice rigid panel.
• Grab a large mirror if you have one around the house. These are super reflectors.

Lightening The Background

Taking the last section a little further, you can easily lighten the background without blowing out the highlights on your subject. You can even make the background completely white. The key is to use a scrim. A scrim is just a piece of translucent material that will diffuse the light, but at the cost of losing light.

So you place a store bought scrim (they come with those 5 in 1 reflector kits) between the light and the subject. You can also just hang a white sheet. But, make sure that the light still falls directly on the background. What happens is that the light be darker on your subject and lighter on the background. When you then adjust the exposure on your subject to compensate, the background becomes lighter! The added advantage is that the scrim is now acting as the light source on your subject. This means the light source is big, and big means soft.

Camera Settings and White Balance

Portrait outtake,
just for fun.

Using flash can sometimes cause your camera to behave a little strange. This is especially apparent if you’re using studio lights with incandescent modeling lights. You see, the modeling bulbs in the strobes have a much warmer color temperature than the strobe bulbs do. If your camera is set on auto white balance, it will balance to the incandescent light. When you snap the picture, the photos will often times look blue because daylight balanced light from the strobes takes on a blue color when corrected in the camera for incandescent light.

How do you fix this? Just set your camera’s white balance setting to “flash” and you’re set. Or, if you’re shooting in RAW, then you can easily change the white balance after the shot if you forgot to before hand.

Your Turn

Now it’s your turn to try this out for yourself. Try out this one light portrait stuff and see how you can get amazing shots with minimal equipment. Then post some of your photos to the Sublime Light photo pool so everyone can see your work. If you have questions, head on over to the Sublime Light forums, where you’ll find someone to answer your question for you.

Next week I’ll let you use two lights. Scouts honor.