When I’m shooting portraits, I like to keep my lighting setup simple. It’s not that I don’t like fancy lighting setups with modifiers and gels and all that jazz. I’m just too lazy to set everything up. Also, I don’t own a lot of lighting gear, so I try to make do with what I have.
This portrait of Margaret that I shot the other night is a good example of keeping things simple. All I used here was two speedlights. The main light is a Nikon SB-600 at 1/4 power in a shoot-through umbrella just above head level and to camera left. I also had a bare Nikon SB-600 at 1/2 power directly behind her blasting at the wall. I set the zoom on the backlight to 14mm so that I could get pretty wide coverage. Exposure on the camera was 1/125th second at f/8 at ISO 200.
Here’s a look at how everything was set up:
The camera on the tripod is approximately where I was standing (Margaret used the same lighting setup for a self-portrait). The SB-600 that I used for the backlight is on the pile of books on the coffee table behind Margaret. I angled the flash head up towards the wall, so I could get a nice gradual falloff towards the ceiling. Nothing fancy here.
Looking at the final image, you’d never know that it was shot in the middle of a living room using a blank wall as a backdrop. I love that I can use two relatively cheap speedlights and an umbrella and get a nice-looking studio-like portrait just about anywhere I want.
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