Face to Face: Rick Sammon's Complete Guide to Photographing People

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such as the Photo Basic Kit from F.J. Westcott

(http://www.fjwestcott.com) that you see in this

lesson’s opening shot.

Most kits include three lights (one light is placed

behind the model in the opening picture), umbrel-

las (shown here) or softboxes (shown later in this

lesson) to spread and diffuse the light for a flatter-

ing effect, and light stands to support the lights.

Professional portrait, fashion, and glamour pho-

tographers spend big bucks on studio lighting

equipment that offers total creative control over

lighting their subjects.

As a dedicated photo enthusiast, however, you

don’t necessarily have to break the piggy bank to

get professional-quality results. In fact, for about

$500 you can get a portable studio lighting kit,

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You can assemble a portable lighting kit in about

10 minutes (if you work quickly), transforming

a den or a living room into a photo studio. For

easy toting, the kit folds into a compact case. The

case for my kit is about the size and weight of my

wooden acoustic guitar case and guitar (20 lbs).

The lights in the opening shot are called “hot

lights.” The light source is a photoflood light bulb

with a standard screw base that provides continu-

ous light, just like the lights in your living room.

Most pros don’t use hot lights. They use much

more expensive strobe lights that provide a flash

burst, just like a camera’s flash only much more

powerful. The high-power strobe lights let you

shoot at low ISO settings for pictures without dig-

ital noise. The bright light also lets you shoot at

small f-stops for good depth of field.

Hot lights are not as powerful as strobes. They are

called hot lights because they get very hot—and

so can subjects when positioned close to them.

When using hot lights, you need to use a higher

ISO setting than when using strobes, which may

mean more digital noise in your pictures. In addi-

tion, when using hot lights you’ll probably need

to use a tripod (or image stabilization or vibra-

tion reduction lens) to steady your camera at slow

shutter speeds to avoid blurry pictures caused

by camera shake. For the hot light pictures that

I took for this lesson, even with an ISO setting of

400, my shutter speed was only 1/60 of a second

when my f-stop was set at f/5.6.

When using strobes, camera shake is not a prob-

lem, because even at a shutter speed of 1/60 of a

second, the flash fires at about 1/10,000 of a sec-

ond to “freeze” any subject or camera movement.

One of the major advantages of hot lights is that

you can check shadows and highlights as you

move the lights around, toward and away from

your subjects. With strobes, you need to wait until

after you take the picture to check the results on

your camera’s LCD monitor—unless the strobes

have modeling lights (lights that stay on and il-

luminate the subject so that the photographer can

see where shadows may fall).

When affordable hot light or strobe kits are placed

and used correctly, they can give you results that

rival those of the pros! Let’s take a look at a few

examples.