Vibrant studio portraits

TINT YOUR SUBJECT AND BACKDROP BY FITTING GELS TO YOUR LIGHT SOURCES

Light source

You can use colour gels on any light source, but flash tends to give the best clarity of colour and light. Studio heads like this are ideal, but you could equally use Speedlights. With two or more flashes in the setup, use a wireless trigger and set them to optical remote, so that they all fire simultaneously.

Backdrop

A plain backdrop – such as a wall, a pop-up reflector, a roll of paper, or even a white sheet – will give you a blank canvas on which to spray your chosen colours onto. A neutral grey roll, like the one that we used, is ideal, as it gives greater colour saturation than a simple white backdrop.

Edge lighting

Lighting the subject from the side or behind will create dramatic edge highlights. This often works best with hard light sources, like the snoot used to the right of the subject here. The snoot has no colour gel, so it lights the face in our main portrait with ‘normal’ balanced light, while the shadows and backdrop are tinted.

Gelled Softbox

A softbox to the left of the camera here has been fitted with a purple gel. This light is set to a lower power than our key light (the snoot on the right), so its main job is to gently fill in the shadows. At the same time, it tints the shadows purple, and adds variation to the blue light hitting the backdrop.

Background colour

In our three-light setup here we have a snoot and a gelled softbox trained on our subject. Our third light is angled towards the backdrop. This is fitted with a blue gel, resulting in a strong blue tint to the background. By moving the light closer or further away, we can control the spread of colour.

Posing

Gelled flashes often work best when lighting the subject from the side or behind, but this means that you’ll need to pose your subject more side-on, so that the light touches the edges of the face and the figure. This is a great way to separate your subject from the background in your images.

Setting exposure

Whenever using two or more flashes it’s best to use Manual mode for your exposure. Start by matching your exposure to one light source, then turn the others on and adjust the power until they work together. A good stock exposure setting to begin with is 1/200 sec, f/8, ISO100. Tweak the aperture and flash power until everything looks right.

Build from the back

Using several flashes can get complicated, so it helps to build the lighting one at a time. Normally, we’d start with the key light (the main light for our subject), but when gelling a backdrop it’s easier to start by working out an exposure for the back light, then building up from there.