Business Portrait with 3 lights

This is a business portrait from the final session the day I used almost the same lighting setup for three different clients with just the addition of one more light for every new “model”.

It started with the one light setup with a test model (a friend with a skate board), which resulted in these portraits of a Swedish singer.

Later the same day, I shot some business portraits using two lights, and last, the portrait above with a third light used as fill light. Just a little, to make the texture in his face become more visible, and the shadows more open.

3 light setup diagram for business portraits

The only difference between this setup and the last, is the fill light from the third light coming from camera right through a panel (Chimera) with diffusion fabric. As I used a Profoto Compact 300 monobloc together with the two Profoto D1 250 Air, I had to put ND-filter in front of it to lower the output.

I really like the idea of recycling lighting setups, or maybe have a basic setup to build from, especially those days when I have more than one portrait session booked. It makes things so much simpler if you don’t have to start from scratch every time.

But I must admit that there are ways to do this and get much more varied results, the grey background in these portraits are almost the same, so just switching the background paper would have made a big difference.

And that is not very hard to do (even if I think grey almost always works best for portraits). Or add a fourth light to create a gradient or pattern on the background. As long as the basic lighting works, everything else is just details that might (or might not) make it a better portrait.