Getting soft, evenly lit studio portraits that don't look flat is harder than it sounds. The difference between a portrait that reads as natural and one that looks like it was shot under a work light usually comes down to how you're bouncing and controlling your light.
Coming to you from Prince Meyson, this detailed video walks through four lighting setups Meyson used during a single portrait session, shot with a Sony a7R V and a Viltrox 135mm f/1.8 as his primary lens. The first setup he tried was a feathered umbrella off to the side of his subject. It produced Rembrandt-style shadows, which looked fine on its own, but wasn't what he was going for. He wanted even, soft light with controlled shadow, not directional drama, so he scrapped it and rebuilt the setup from scratch.
The core setup he landed on uses a large, roughly six-foot umbrella pointed at a V-flat instead of directly at the subject. The umbrella throws a wide, soft spread of light at the white surface of the V-flat, which then bounces it back toward both the subject and the background simultaneously. Additional V-flats on the sides of the subject create contrast and shape without adding another light source. The result is a portrait that reads like natural window light, even, soft, with enough shadow to give the face dimension. He shot this at f/7 and 1/160 of a second, and the backdrop comes out nearly seamlessly lit without any extra effort.
Two of the other setups introduce a Godox spotlight attachment paired with a Zhiyun Molus B500 LED light set to 2,700 K while keeping the white balance at 5,600 K. That gap between the LED's color temperature and the white balance setting is intentional. It makes the subject read warm while the background, still lit by a strobed Godox AD600 Pro bouncing off the V-flat, goes cool and slightly blue. The contrast between warm subject and cool background gives the image a look that's hard to fake in post. The spotlight itself, fitted with a cylindrical attachment, creates a long vertical strip of light that Meyson uses as a key light to carve out shape on the subject. He's candid that the large Godox spotlight is overkill for photography and says he'd go smaller if he were buying again.
The fourth and final setup is the most stripped down: the B500 with a round projector attachment as a key light, and a second B500 bounced off a white wall for fill. No V-flats, no bounce boards, just two lights doing different jobs. Meyson shot that setup at f/1.4 with both a 50mm and a Viltrox 85mm f/1.8 at 1/200 of a second. The video also covers how he finished these images in Photoshop. Check out the video above for the full breakdown from Meyson, including the Photoshop work behind the final images.
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