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Portrait Photography Lighting 101- Learn the portriat lighting and portrait photography lighting tips you always wanted to know about. We will discuss all aspects of portrait photography lighting, including portrait lighting equipment, terms, portrait lighting concepts and diagrams.

Portrait Photography Lighting Tips

Portrait lighting and portrait photography lightingis something that most every novice photographer wants to learn more about.  This article is meant to be an information source and a starting point for understanding the concepts, terms, technique, and mysteries of portrait photography and portrait photography lighting.  This how-to article will explain such things as light ratios, the differences between using umbrellas and soft boxes, and various portrait lighting set-ups that you can use as a starting point in your first attempts at portrait photography and portrait photography lighting.

Portrait Photography Lighting Tips
Testimonial portrait photography lighting project with lighting diagram.

Portrait photography lighting set-up
Sample of a proven portrait lighting setup used for business and personal individual photography portraits (with samples).

Portrait photography lighting set-up names
Learn the names and see samples of the various lighting setups so that you can better communicate with others.

Portrait lighting and source size
The size of the light source makes a bid difference in portrait photography. See a side-by-side comparison of many different source sizes.

Portrait lighting and light distance
Learn how the distance between subject and light source affects the photography portrait

Understanding portrait photography lighting ratios
The relative brightness of the shadows are a very important issue in portrait photography. See what different light ratios look like.

Portrait Lighting - Umbrellas or Light Boxes?
Portrait Photographers wonder which is better for portrait photography.

Portrait lighting diagrams
See the portrait lighting diagrams that the professional portrait photographers understand and use every day.

Portrait photography lighting model

Meet Sandy.  Sandy’s a mannequin and has been a guest of my studio for many years now.  I use her for setting up portrait photography shoots before the subjects arrives.  I use Sandy for my portrait photography setups because she’s amazingly patient and never gives me any grief.  Those are the same two reasons I never use my kids or my wife to set up my portrait lighting…  :+) 

I’ve decided to use her for our portrait photography lighting model for two really good reasons: she works really cheap and because using her will take away the “expression” variable so we can talk about the portrait lighting without being distracted by the variables a human would bring to the photos.  She may not be human, but she’s one heck of a soccer player.  Look at all those medals!