Shooting Portraits with One Speedlight

this episode is sponsored by Squarespace whether you need a domain website or online store make your next move with Squarespace I think the common assumption is that if you're going to get it to shooting strobes with portraits it's a very expensive and complicated thing to do it puts a lot of photographers off from even trying but I don't think it needs to be nearly as intimidating as it is to a lot of photographers in fact you can do a lot with very little a little while ago I made a video going back to South Africa and I took some portraits of my mentors and a lot of you are very kind about those portraits and made some nice comments but but I was quite surprised by some people who jumped on and said we obviously can't shoot that kind of portrait unless you've got pretty fancy gear and that's obviously not true in fact everything I've got with me here is plenty to be able to produce stuff at exactly the same quality so what I'm gonna do is walk you through exactly what I'd use on a budget to get exactly the same kind of shots I get why a lot of photographers find strobe intimidating I found it intimidating at the beginning it took me a long time to play with strobes and start to test it out because I just felt there was gonna be too much to control I couldn't really see what the light was doing like a constant light or like daylight and and I didn't know what I was getting and how does it trigger and it's quite difficult to control and so I put it off for ages but when I actually took the plunge and got into it as a portrait photographer it expanded the possibilities of what I could shoot so much I mean forget just studio I mean that's obvious you need strobe for that but even shooting outdoors in natural light and adding strobes in different ways which I might do a video on at some stage just expands the looks you can get and the kind of feel you can get in your images don't get me wrong you can absolutely be a natural light only photographer and that can be a legitimate creative choice I know a lot of great natural light photographers but I also know there are a lot of photographers out there declaring themselves natural light only photographers and it's more because of a fear of ever wanting to touch strobes I'll show you my very untechnical way of setting uplights and getting a good exposure I've never been very technical about light meters and the rest of it so I've got a very simple technique which I use to get a quick exposure that stays the same and is constant through the whole shoot and I'm just gonna show you with one light because I think if you're gonna start in strobe it's good just to begin with one light learn how to use that light well and then start adding lights as you go and to be honest my image is nowadays nineteen ninety five percent of my images are all one light because I just like the really clean and classical look so hopefully when I show you how simple this is it's gonna give you the courage to at least give it a go for yourself okay so let me show you the gear I'm using I'm literally just in my lounge it's like a normal London flat it's not very big so it will kind of give you an idea of you know how much you could do in a small space especially when I've got a little bit of gear we'll start out with the backdrop so these you can pick up off Amazon pretty much most online retailers will sell them all you need to search for is something like this is a 2 meter by 1 point 5 meter collapsible backdrop this one has a reversible surface so that you can actually choose different different colors I've got black on one side and white on the other and today we're just gonna use the black so it just flips out like that and all I'm gonna do and all that would do in someone else's house it's just prop that up against the wall here I'm just using a little fake fireplace because that will do the job and the other thing I have inside here is a little handheld reflector but I'll get to that in a second let's talk about the light so here's my little travel light stand it's a Manfrotto five double-o 1b the great thing about these you can see without this little attachment it's quite a small light stand it folds up pretty small because the legs fold up against itself so it ends up being really small if you want to fit this in a suitcase it's really really great because you could take this attachment off the top which I'll show you in a second and it's really nice and small so all you do is loosen the legs like this not very expensive Manfrotto a little more pricey than the other ones but you can get some generic collapsible light stands that really aren't that expensive at all and the clever thing about it is it's actually got four sections which you can which you can raise up so it can go quite high it can go to almost two meters at the point where your adapter meet at the end of the light stand because of those four sections they can telescope up but it can also go down pretty small so the the actual head that I use the adapter that I use for my lights here is a Bowens mount bones Speedline mount that's probably what you want to search for and I'll show you why these are great so let me grab the light that I'm going to use the light is my go DOCSIS speed light you can use any speed light I used to use the little young no speed lights which are really cheap really inexpensive but the light output at those is exactly the same and they're really good there's a lot of them more powerful ones of those is all manual lights but I only use speed lights in manual anyway I don't use TTL I'll get into that in a second and the little girl ops trigger but we'll get to that too when we get to the camera so the reason this is great is because it's a Bowens s mount adapter so you can clip on any softboxes or collapse all beauty dishes which often use onto this with these three pins it clicks in place it gives you a lot of options in terms of the modifiers you can use and it's also got a little umbrella hole at the bottom so you can put an umbrella as well and because your speed light actually clamps into the middle like this it means that the light is centered in the middle of where your softbox is attached there's another bracket which a lot of people use and it's it's this one it's this little kind of L bracket and what you normally do is put a cold shoe on top and that means that you can attach the speed light say you've got a cold shoe mount on the top of this I'm just showing you why don't use these in particular and then the speed light sits on top here and you can angle this in and then if you want your umbrella bracket the umbrella sticks through the bottom but you can see how much distance there is between the center of that umbrella and the speed light it's kind of shooting into the top of the umbrella and not actually to the center of it which is why I don't use these very much I use this because it means that the light is hitting right into the center of your modifier because if you stick the speed light or the softbox on the front here the light goes right into the middle if you've got your umbrella here the light is almost hitting bang in the middle as well so I find these really useful another nice little thing about these as well is I've got one with a handle on it so if I'm ever using a light outside with an assistant I can actually have an assistant hand hold this with an umbrella on front or a softbox and just hold it over the subject and be able to move around what I think in the industry is called a voice-activated light stand which just means someone who's kind enough to to stand there and hold everything for you in terms of the modifier I use a bunch of modifiers that this is pretty much one of the cheapest options I think you can find they're called soft lighters in a lot of places and this one I picked up it's it's a generic one it's not actually this soft lighter brand it's a Wally Mex pro I think it's a 120 centimeter and I'll show you what it does this is a very very inexpensive I think these are 20 pounds on Amazon and it gives a beautiful soft light it folds up incredibly small you can let you just carry this against the the stand when you're walking around so you've got this and the stand in one hand you've got the backed up in the other and the backpack with your camera and a speedlight super simple so I'll show you how this works if you look inside all I'm gonna do is open this out just like an umbrella and what happens is is the light shoots inside and then it fills this space and it comes bouncing back out through this diffusion material so it has a nice bounce and then back to the diffusion material means it gives you quite a big soft light source and all I'm gonna do to attach this is put this through my umbrella piece at the bottom here and there we go make sure it's turned up to the top just need to twist this up a second and make sure this is lined up here put the skirt over the actual bracket pull it closed and then zip it and then tighten this so it doesn't move around the actual umbrella doesn't move around and that means that I'm going to get a really nice soft light source basically like a nice soft box style light source for the actual speed light I'm going to make sure when I turn it on that I am set to 24 mil okay so with lots of speed lights you can change the angle of the like I want this at the widest angle possible so when the light goes in here it's gonna fill as much of that modifier as possible and come back out as soft as possible so I don't want it zoomed in at 105 or whatever I want it as wide as possible so it's 24 millon here and I'm making sure that's it it's set to manual and I'll show you how I shoot with that in a second and that's pretty much my light source so I'm going to pop this over here I'm going to pop my stool down for my subject and we are ready to start shooting and seeing if we can get a good exposure so Sara's kindly agree just to sit in on this just to give us a subject the first thing I want to do is position my light and I'm gonna move this around and try different looks as we go basically I want to make sure all the time that this umbrella stick is pointing at her head roughly speaking that just gives me a guideline I don't always want it facing directly you can kind of move it around and cheat it a little bit but that gives me an idea of where it's pointing so first of all I want to get high enough and I normally start with a basic kind of Rembrandt light which kind of means that if I wanted Rembrandt light which is at one side of the face look nicely and just light spinning around just not the opposite cheek to give that little triangle the rough rule is to be 45 degrees off-axis and 45 degrees above so if I put it about here I should get a fairly nice Rembrandt light now I've got my black background behind so I know my backgrounds gonna be nice and dark but at the moment I can see that the light is gonna spill quite a bit on that background and I want to prevent that a little bit so what I'm gonna do is cheat it and this is called feathering which means that the light's still positions sort of where I want is still going to wrap around a bit and I can move it and adjust it so that I can change the light look as I go but by feathering it means just going to keep it off the background it's not facing the background as much and it's going to spill past there a little bit and I'm gonna get some of these softer edges instead of the very middle of the light source and that's really gonna help and that's that go I'm gonna try different things so if I want more drama in the image if I want more shadow I'm gonna take it around to the side and that's going to mean that I'm gonna get starting to get to split lighting but all of one side of the face is gonna be covered in shadow if I bring it more round to the front and more overhead which I'll do at some stage it's going to give a softer nicer kind of beauty lighting look so you'll get that nice t-zone with sort of a hot forehead and nose and cheeks and it'll suck in the cheeks on the side because it'll create a bit of shadow and maybe sort of lips in the bottom of the chin so it gives nice shape so it's going to depend from split lighting to sort of Rembrandt to kind of more overhead beauty I can start to move that around and play with looks and sort of a style that I want to get so that's the light setup and the power on it is 1 over 32 power I mean I don't even know if that's right at the moment I'll get to that in a second I'll show you my very untechnical way for getting exposure reading I've never been much of a light meter guy I don't really get that technical I like to see what I'm gonna get in the camera so you'll see how I get an exposure now I'm obviously on manual mode I don't use TTL so the flashes on manual as well I just find TTL sometimes if the metering changes at all then the flash changes and you're trying to keep up and you're trying to meet it differently if I just said it manual in camera manual on the flash it stays the whole way through the shoot exactly at that power and I don't need to mess around so I know what my settings need to be I want to be on ISO 100 low as possible to keep the noise out I am on F 2.8 because I'm on the Sony a7 3 which is a full-frame camera and my favorite lens for portraits at the moment is this 55 mils is 1.8 I like 50 mil 55 milk for portraits at the moment it's just become my favorite focal length I used to be an 85 milk eye but I find you're a lot further away from your subject with 85 mil 55 to 50 so it gives you a bit more intimacy you can get in a bit closer to your subject it doesn't distort but it kind of gives you a slightly more intimate feel which I really like and if you're shooting portraits outdoors it gives a bit more context which I enjoy as well so I'm on 2.8 because that's it's sort of depth of field I want 55 mil on a full frame at 2.8 is gonna give me a sharp front of the face by the time you get the ears it's gonna be slightly blurry back of the head you're gonna be blurred out and that's exactly the sort of depth of field I want and I am at the moment on one two hundredth of a second on my shutter speed and my shutter speed is what I'm gonna change probably the most to sort of dial in the light the way that I want it between the shutter speed and the actual light itself you need to check the luxury I have with this trigger and this light is that it has high-speed sync which means I can push my shutter speed really fast and the flash will keep up but I mean when I used to use the young no flashes for example I didn't have high speed sync between the trigger and the flash and you get the issue called sink which means your your screen starts to fill up with black because the faster your shutter speed goes your shutter is firing too fast for your light to keep up and be captured so you need to check which flash you're using and when you start to get those issues I remember my canons used to be about one over one sixtieth of a second but because I've got this trigger this light the godox set up I've got high-speed sync which means I can go right up to 4,000 per second it's not a problem now I don't know if this exposure is gonna be right so the only way to do it really is to just take a test shot I know my ice is gonna stay the same my aperture is gonna stay the same and I'm going to balance the rest to get the look I want in camera and once it's there I can just shoot all day so it's gonna take a test shot and Sarah's eyes are closed which are lovely and I'm pretty much where I want to be actually I might just brighten it a touch so just adjusting it on here I'm gonna change up to 116 power something like that and I'm gonna take another shot and that's pretty much a good exposure now I know I don't need to touch anything now that exposure will stay the same because the manual settings aren't moving I don't have to rely on metering if anything changes in the space and also the the light isn't changing either it's staying at the same power so I'm gonna get a really consistent look the whole way through and just be able to move the light slightly to adjust the look of the light and to adjust the power one quick thing to mention is you want to make sure that none of the ambient light is influencing your shot that the only light on your subject is your actual strobe light so you can see that there is light in this room I just need to make sure that this light is so powerful and I'm exposing for it that when I expose correctly for the strobe none of the ambient light is visible and the quick way to do that is to let you just turn your trigger off so now my light won't fire and to take a test shot and the screen on the back of my camera which you can see should all be black I should be able to see any image and that means that the light we can see here this exposure is set so low that it doesn't pick any of this ambient light up so I know the only light that's influencing my shot is the strobe which is all I want and I can turn my strobe back on and take a shot and I can see that only my strobe is visible if you don't check this you might find that there's you know a tungsten light in the room and you're getting a bit of tungsten like washing in with your strobe light or there's there's light from the Sun that's coming in filling all your shadows and you're not getting the drama in the shot that you want if you want to totally control your shot and make sure the light is exactly what you intend this is a really really crucial step the only other little bits I've got are a gray card so the first shot I'm going to take is on a grey card you can get cheap grey cards just have a look at the reviews if you're buying them and make sure the gray is an accurate middle gray so that you can color pick on it in Lightroom make sure all your colors accurate you could get one of these which is a color checker passport you can get very fancy you can actually use the color tiles on this and run software in Lightroom and other programs which will make sure that your colors all the different colors across the spectrum are exactly accurate personally I don't with that too much I just hold the grey card up front and then just make sure that I grab a shot just the back towards you face a little bit more and then what you're making sure is that the light that's going to heat a subject hits that grey card I can color pick that first shot and I know that my white balance is gonna be good all the way through it's already set to flash white balance in camera so I'm where I need to be but that gray car is gonna make sure just that last little bit that my colors are accurate all the way through because flashes are all slightly different temperatures different cameras treat color slightly differently this sort of helps you technically to get right where you need to be the only other little thing I take around with me which is in that case with the backdrop is a little pop-up handheld reflector and this I just have below me here sometimes I get my subject to hold it as well and this just means if the shadows under the chin are getting a little harsh I can sort of pull this in or out just to make sure that the light is bouncing back in and filling as much as I want I don't want too much of this because I want shadow and shape but this helps me control how much and it also just gives a lovely little catch light in the bottom of the eye because you can see that circle of white light reflected so that's my setup I'm gonna fire through a bunch of different looks we're gonna try some different tops and move the light around a little bit to see what looks we can get with a very very basic setup in quite a small space [Music] [Music] so I hope this has shown you that you can actually produce really quality portraits with just a little bit of gear stuff that's pretty affordable and isn't a lot to carry around you could also build a kit a lot cheaper than I've done in this video you could instead of using the Sony a7 3 like I've got you could go and pick yourself up a secondhand Canon 5d Mark 1 or a mark 2 for way cheaper you could get yourself a Canon 50 mil 1.4 get yourself a young no speedlights as well those things are really cheap and a generic trigger you can have a cheap foldable light stands one of these pop-up backdrops which really doesn't cost very much and one of those little soft light as I showed you and you could probably build a kit for about six hundred seven hundred pounds and that's a completely mobile studio that you can shoot quality headshots or portrait anywhere you go and you could travel around even smaller than this I mean you could just go with this if you know that you've got a background on location or somewhere even in your house that you can use in the shot but if you're going to use these and they're really inexpensive and really useful as backdrops this is probably the most practical tip I can give you because there's nothing worse than shooting with a client with one of these backgrounds and then getting to the end of your shoot and realizing that you actually can't fold the thing up I used to have assistants who who struggle with the suit would take them a few minutes at the end of shoots to get it done there is a trick to it that gets it done quickly all you want to do is put it in front of you two hands at the top here fold it in half rotate your hands around so you're facing a different way and then just fold it in on itself from both sides so I'll do it again so just at the top ten and two fold it in half rotate your hands around and then twist it against each other and then it's it's small enough and that will save you looking like a little bit of a muppet it's true that speedlights have their limitations you're never going to take them outside and battle the midday Sun with them they just don't have that kind of power output but when you're shooting studio portraits you're always indoors in an environment where you can control the ambient lights I mean you saw me shooting my lounge all I did was draw the curtain so the ambient-light didn't overpower the strobe or influence the exposure in any way and I was only capturing the strop and then it's plenty and if I told you I took those images in a fancy studio with fancy lights and you hadn't seen the process would you really have known I was lying so don't let a lack of money or huge amounts of fancy gear put you off if you can get together enough just to get this basic kit you can produce really good images that you can be very proud of thanks again to Squarespace for sponsoring this video if you need a new website or a domain they really are a fantastic option I've used them myself for years now back in the beginning when I started shooting headshots and portraits for a business I did two things right up front the first was I got hold of friends and models and shot around as much as possible to build up images for portfolio and the second thing was to get myself a website and I chose Squarespace so that I could load up all those images onto a good-looking site and then point potential clients to them so they could see what I was doing I was always really proud to send people to my website especially in those early days because I was producing images I was proud of but the website itself was such a clean and minimal place that made my images sing the templates that Squarespace has got a really modern and crisp and they put your images front and center if you want to take a look at my site I've used a template called Wexley for years now and that's been the visual home for my work start your free trial today at squarespace.com and go to Squarespace com forward slash Sean Tucker to get 10% of your first purchase [Music] [Music]

Channel: Sean Tucker

Views: 1,354,868

Keywords: portrait, portrait photography, speedlight, godox speedlight, godox, softlighter, one light, one light portrait, speedlight portrait, black background, collapsible background, rembrandt lighting, overhead lighting, split lighting, travel light stand, zeiss 55mm, sony a7iii, grey card, wireless trigger, high speed sync, flash sync, shooting portraits, sean tucker

Id: nuoc53wcnbc

Length: 22min 22sec (1342 seconds)

Published: Sun May 19 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/celtic1888]

I really, really like Sean Tucker's channel. He is very thorough, not hyper-opinionated and peaceful which is so hard to find on youtube.

I don't shoot product or portrait photography but even those videos are interesting and informative for me.

[u/pzonee]

All of sean's videos are incredibly helpful...I use this method of shooting portraits at home in my living room and get fantastic results

Fixed the link (again)

[u/BlackInsomniac-]

Tucker's channel is dope. His videos are really mature and perceptive. I've learned a lot from him

[u/yatg30]

This is a great video. Like all of his other videos. Though what he told today was told many years ago by some guy who ran a blog called Lighting 101.

[u/Hummusrecipesneeded]

i just watched this. I always find it odd that people are afraid of speedlights? That is pretty much when photography starts to really get good. After all you're painting with light

[u/shemp33]

Great results, inexpensive parts list (speedlight, radio transmitter/receiver, umbrella/softbox, black popup background), included examples of the shots. Very nicely done, and kudos to Sean.

[u/ungr8fu11]

I really like Sean's videos. I did notice that he talked about adjusting shutter speed to effect the strobe. However, shutter really only affects ambient light, ie constant since a strobe is for a fraction of a second (I dont do high speed sync). Please corrected me if I'm wrong. Typically I'll shoot at 1/200 which is the fastest sync and then adjust power and aperture to create mood. If it sounds like I'm spewing David hobby, it's where I learned most ofc and playing around because it's fun as hell. All in all it is a great video and fantastic tips. He is an awesome teacher.

[u/maitre_vince]

He (Sean Tucker) once got hired from my company to help us with our (mostly portrait) photos.

I’ve spend two days with him and he showed me his tricks in Photoshop and portrait shooting, ive learned more in those 2 days than in 5 years of photography!

This guy is awesome, kind and calm, it was so much fun working with him

[u/csbphoto]

Highly recommend checking out Nick Fancher's book, Studio Anywhere.