One light beautydish portrait setup

As I try to make some of my portraits and lighting setups as simple as possible, one of my favorite lighting modifiers is the white Profoto Softlight Reflector, or beautydish as most people call it.

In this headshot of a very creative and talented Swedish artist and creator of children’s playgrounds (among a lot of other things) I wanted to use just one light, and have a lot of contrast in the portrait.

Less power means nicer portraits

After having used Profoto Compact monoblocs for a couple of years now, the addition of the Profoto AcuteB 600R recently gives me the possibility of shooting portraits with a lot more shallow depth of field (without having to use ND-filters on the lens or light). And I love it.

And on top of that, the smaller size of the heads means that I can push the light a little closer to the ceiling, in my small studio every inch counts.

Lighting diagram with just one light

For this kind of portraiture I almost always use my favourite portrait lens, the Nikkor 85 mm/1.4. It gives me nice results every time, and the closer I go, the better it gets.

During this session I shot ordinary headshots, half-length portraits and everything in-between. Going further away than that, I think the lens loses a bit of its magic. And a portrait should be pretty close-up, I’m not that interested in knees or feet.

Positioning the light right

When using only one light for a portrait, how to position the light is more a question of how and where you want the shadows to fall. In this particular portrait I really wanted one side of his face and head to almost fade to black.

The reason for that part not really being completely black is because of the white wall in the room that reflects a small amount of the light and act as a reflector. It would be easy to fix with something black (fabric or paper) next time.

For most portraits, placing just one light this high up and close might be a problem as the light doesn’t light the eyes enough. But with his glasses and how they look, I think it works with just a small catchlight in one of the eyes.

Almost straight from camera, almost

I adjusted the colors a little bit, correcting the white balance with a grey card, and added a little contrast with a layer of Gradient Map in Photoshop. Nothing more really. After resizing for web, I sharpened the photo with a copy of the image layer, ran the High Pass filter and changed the blend mode to Soft Light and lowered the opacity to 50% or so, just to bring out the detail in the sharp portions of the face a bit. Not wanting the sharpening effect to affect every part of the image, I added a layer mask for the High Pass layer and painted the out-of-focus areas black.

Using only one light is a great way to see how just the smallest adjustments can create a very different picture. Turn the head a little bit, change the angle of the camera or just take a step left.

Before ending this session, I also tried adding a rim light from behind the model camera left and a reflector from below, but that will be something for my next post I think.