Practice portrait lighting at home
Get your head around portrait lighting without the need for an impatient human subject.
There are many things you can still photograph if you’re stuck indoors, but you can really only practise portraiture with somebody to sit for you – and recently, hiring and being in close proximity to a model isn’t the best idea.
If you’re lucky, you might have a partner, family member or housemate willing to let you take some photos. But what if you don’t have someone under the same roof, or you don’t have someone willing to sit there for hours while you perfect a bunch of lighting setups?
Yes, you can try self-portraits. However, to really learn how to use your lights and to see how their placement affects your subject, you need to be on the other side of the camera.
The solution? Purchase a mannequin head! There are a vast number of different heads available online, with eBay and Amazon being the best places to start looking. A low-cost polystyrene or styrofoam head will be enough to show you how the placement of your lights creates different lighting patterns. However, for best results we recommend purchasing a professional mannequin head – also known as a dressmaker’s dummy or haberdashery head. Rather than being all white, these are available in different skin tones so that you can see how varying light temperatures affect differing skin colour. Some heads can be articulated, and some even have proper eye detail that can pick up catchlights.
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CAMERA SETTINGS Both flash and LEDS require different exposures. LEDs are less powerful so require a higher ISO and slower shutter (above). With flash lighting, the ISO was set to 100, with a shutter of 1/200sec.
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SORT YOUR SPACE Set your head up in a darkened room or studio space. Before adding your external lights, start by taking a control image to see how the ambient illumination affects the subject on its own.
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SINGLE SIDELIGHT You only need one light for this project, as you can place it in different positions with modifiers to see how it affects the subject. We used a Yongnuo flashgun with a honeycomb attachment.
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SPLIT LIGHTING Placing your light at 90 degrees, you get a dramatic split lighting effect (when the subject’s face is ‘split’ by the light). Using a mannequin shows how the iris is illuminated by the light from this angle.
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SINGLE FLASH WITH BOUNCE CARD Set up the single flash unit in an elevated position. We angled the head upwards and attached a bounce card – a Rogue FlashBender 2 – to ricochet softer light down onto the subject
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REMBRANDT LIGHTING Move the light forward enough so that a small amount spills onto the other side of your subject’s face. This setup produces the signature triangle of light on the cheek opposite the light source.
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SANDWICH LIGHTING If you have extra lighting sources, start introducing them. You can experiment with adding gels and colours, and the placement of the lighting. Here, we placed one either side of the head.
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COLOURED SPLIT LIGHTING Here we’ve used a pair of LED strip lights to create split lighting. This is a great way to see how power differs between LEDs and flash, and to introduce complementary colour palettes.