Before we go any further, we need to understand some of the lighting terminology we're going to use. So we're going to look at a main light, which is also called key light, we're going to look a fill light, a rim light, and a background light. And we'll show you how they work and what they look like in the 3d software. So let's go and have a look at the virtual studio and get a grasp of these core concepts when it comes to lighting. In this scenario, what we've actually got is if we scroll above, we can see we've got camera straight in front, we've got the subject and the light is now 45 degrees on to the subject in this particular lighting pattern, but that doesn't make it the main light. What makes it the main light is this is the strongest lighting source and as we add more lights, we will build up a portray profile.

Now you can actually shoot a portrait with one light. But what we're going to do in this is we're going to show you How we add main light and fill light and all the rest of it. So let's just have a look what that image actually looks like we've just the main light. And as you can see, we've got quite a lot of light on the face, it's pretty much exposed correctly. If we look at the histogram, in the top right hand side here, we see we're pushing over slightly on there, but that's fine. I'm not too worried about the exposure on this.

And remember, if you want to understand exposure, check out our understanding exposure course will help you to look at the histogram and understand histogram. So in this instance, that was main light supplies the most amount of light on the subject and is usually the one that is the dominant light source so that would create the dominant lighting pattern. And when we come to the loop and the closed loop and the other lighting patterns like Rembrandt, we're going to discuss later that main light, usually delivers that particular style of lighting. So the main light delivers the Rembrandt or it delivers the open and the closed loop and split lighting. So our main light is very, very important. And then we add other lights to soften shadows and create highlights.

Now what you can see here is the fill light. Now the fill light will soften the shadows often on the other side of the main light. If you remember we had the main light on the other side this subject and now we're going to add the fill. But what I want to do is I want to show you what the fill looks like on the subject without the main. Later on, we're going to add all the different lights together. And we're going to show you how they all come together and how they like the subject.

I want you to see them in isolation first so you can understand how each of the lights behave. So here you can see what we're doing is we've got a little bit of fill light on the shadow side of the face. If the main light was on, this would be the shadow side of the face on the subject. Right hand side, and you can see it's just a gentle light, we're just adding a little bit of light. It's not a bright light. It's a very shallow light.

Remember all of the settings and everything we've got, don't worry if you're looking at this thinking, how did you set your speed light, and all the rest of it, how far was the light from the subject? Our PDFs will give you all the floor plans for everything was showing you. But what I want you to do now, rather than worry about how you're going to set your studio is look at the light and how it affects the subject. So as you can see, it's lighting up the shadow side of a face in this particular setup is quite gentle, it's quite light, it's not really bright because all we're trying to do is add a little bit of light into decide the face. Now some people are going to teach you to use reflectors. I'm not using reflectors in this course because reflectors are very hard to control the amount of light when we use flashes, it's much much easier.

And the advantage of flashes is you can control the amount of light falling off Subject with reflectors, you really can only bounce a certain percent of light back and see a very stuck. So learning how to use lights and lighting it with different sizes can be really, really valuable. So as you can see this is a really simple setup, the light is 45 degrees to the subject, filling in the other side as we have already mentioned. Now this is what's called a rim light. There's two types of rim light, there's rim, light and headlight. This Strictly speaking, is hair light.

When we have the flash positioned where we're going to show you in a moment where we've got our lighting that the back of the hair and the shoulders. This is typically called hairline now if I had the flash to one side, and I was just coming over her shoulder, that would be a rim. So there is a difference. The hair light tends to be above the subject and the rim light tends to be off to one side, or it can be off on both sides and then lighting back in that way. But in this instance just want to show you a simple setup that you can use. And the highlight setup is the best one if you just want to get your portraiture up and running.

So as you can see, it's a really simple setup. What we've got is we've got a flash mounted above the subject. Now usually when you mount a flash like this on a subject, you would have a boom arm so that the flash stand is not showing in the background. So pretty straightforward. Sometimes you can mount on a bracket on the CNA, you won't be able to get to change the batteries. So think about that when you send them the studio but as you can see, it is high above let me just turn off this light blocker.

It is high above the subject, and it's coming down at a roughly 45 degree angle. And that gives us our head Light. And if we wanted to create rim light in this scenario, so we take this flash, we just move it around here, and then about 45 degrees, and we would lower the height as well. So it would sit around here, and then just flash over the shoulder says the basic difference between a headlight and a rim light. Now this is a slightly more complex setup. On this one, we're using background lights.

And in this scenario, we're actually going to blow the background out. So what we've got is we've got two flashes either side of the subject. We've got some shoot through umbrellas. And then we've got two flags or blockers here which is stopping the light from this umbrella, hitting the side of the subject that's very, very important. And then what that allows us to do is that allows us to blow the background out. Now you'll notice on my camera settings, I'm shooting it So 200 there is a reason for that.

Flashes don't give us great amount of light, so I want to shoot it f8. So what I can do is push the ISO up in the studio, I won't worry about it too much, you can safely go to 800 on most modern cameras in the studio, try and keep it to 200 if you can, but ISO 800 in well lit situation will perform quite well on most modern cameras. The only reason I'm doing it is because I needed to stop more light to blow that background out. Because the flashes do emit quite a bit of light but it didn't quite enough light to light the background. So the simple studio photography trick in that scenario is just to get ISO up. So this is a clean white background and as you can see the subject is completely silhouetted.

So if you're wondering how you do silhouette is exactly the same scenario. So what we're going to do now is pull all those lights together and see What we've actually got. So let's have a look at this from above. This is a standard white portrait background, we've got our main light here, our key light on the subject, we've got our fill, which is, again, filling in the shadow side, we've got a hair light, which is supporting a little bit of light on the top of the hair and on the shoulders. And then we're blowing our background with our background lights. And what we've essentially done, we've taken those different combinations and we've built them up.

Now when it comes to using your studio, that's the way you want to set your lights up. I would set my main light up first and expose that correctly. Then I would switch that off, especially with flashes because we're flashing you don't have modern lights, so you can't see what light you've gone to. You've taken the picture. Obviously, what you can do is take the set plan was supplied with this on a PDF and use that as a basic starting point, remembering that the flashes you have might slightly differ. So you might have to take them down a little bit depending On how close they are to this because each flash, each speed light will have a slightly different power setting.

But this will give you the ratios you need and all the distances. So as you can see that's, that's, that's our setup. we've now created a full image using a five light setup, we've got the main, we've got the fill, we've got the hair light and the rim, and we've blown our background out. So as you can see, here's our subject. We've got our main light on this side, we've got our fill in this side, we've got a rim across the top of the hair and over the shoulders here and here. And we've got our white blown out background.

So that is how we would build a portrait and the terminology we would use. So hopefully now you can understand main fill, rim and background lines.