PROJECT 3
Dan Mold’s three easy one-light B&W portrait set-ups to follow at home
Portraiture can at times feel like a bit of a dark art. There’s so much jargon and little pieces of equipment to get up to speed on, from flashes to guide numbers, and lighting modifiers to triggers. It can be difficult to know where to start! That’s why this month we’re taking portraits back to basics using a single continuous light bulb to achieve three completely different looks. You can take these shots at home with a basic setup, you’ll need a dark background, a few lightstands, a curtain pole and then a few extra props that we run through below. The three techniques we cover in this project are the perfect place to start with artificial light in a studio setting as we’re using constant lighting. This is different from flashguns which don’t have a modelling light, so will be much easier to tweak the lighting and get the shadows falling on your model precisely where you need them to. Let’s get to it!
PRO TIP
We used constant lighting for these simple setups to make them accessible to everyone, though you can of course use flash instead if you would like to. Although, if you do use flash you’ll need to make sure your flash has a modelling light so that you can see where the shadows are cast in real time. You’ll likely also need to attach an ND filter if you want to shoot at wide apertures like f/1.8 or f/1.4, just as we have in our images to create a lovely, soft sh
