Seven Awesome Portrait Lighting Setups in 70 Seconds

Understanding good lighting is one of the most crucial aspects of creating elegant and compelling portraits. This great video will show you seven common and highly useful portrait lighting setups (most of which only use one light) in just 70 seconds.

Coming to you from Mango Street, this great and quick video will show you seven portrait lighting setups. The best part is that most of them only require one light. I personally think that when you're new to artificial lighting, it's very important to start with just a single light. First, multi-light setups are inherently more complex, of course, but when you're learning how to light, it's very important to gain a technical understanding and intuitive feel for how things like light size, position, and falloff affect your final image. This can be difficult to do with multiple lights, as they can obscure the obviousness of each individual light's behavior. It's well worth trying out each of these setups to gain a feel for them and for your aesthetic preferences; also take the time to vary them a bit to see how changing different factors changes the images. Check out the video above for the full rundown.