So let's have a look at some basic lighting. In this section we're going to show you main light key light fill like rim light, and background light, and all different examples of that. We're also going to show you some basic lighting setup. But I do have another course on portrait photography. So if you really want to learn the classic lighting techniques in portrait photography, check that out. We also have another advanced course on studio lighting, using strobes and showing you the latest techniques and styles that people are using around the world.
But in this we want to give you the basics to get your studio up and running. So I'm going to show you the main light the key light to fill out the rim light and the background light. But let's go and have a look at that what that looks like. So this is a picture with the main light. Now you can see our studio what I've done here is I've removed one of the blocks panels from the wall. Now if you paint your walls black, it just means that sometimes you just have a white panel that you pop there and replace.
And the reason we've done that with one light is we always want to try and bounce a little bit of light back into the shadow side. What we've got is a simple setup here. Let's just zoom in. And remember all of these examples I'm showing you are available as PDFs in the course. So you can see all the distances. In this instance, what I'm actually using is an octave box.
Now this is tough box. And we talked about the 24 inch soft boxes earlier on. And this is a 26 inch octave box. Now, remember, we said you've got one soft box if you only had the little soft box, you'd use that instead. But this the octave box is really good because it gives a nice little wrap around the face. We've got that it's not too far away from the subject as you can see if you want the exact dimensions Have a look at the PDF download and that's going to give you that information printed out.
When we look at this, we've got one light, we've got black panel on one wall, and we've got the light shooting a certain angle. So this setup is really good for men, or if you want a bit of drama in your image, but I just wanted to show you what you can do with one light. You could even use an umbrella for this shot if you didn't have this particular light modifier. So let's actually have a look at the image the rendered image this setup but actually generate now this software simulates our lighting. So this is what we would get from a one light setup. We're shooting at a 45 degree angle to the subject which is standard does you can also shoot straight on to your subject which is another angle on the two angles.
We cover that in great depth in our portrait photography course. So if you're really interested and you don't, you need some help with that, check that course I'm assuming when you set up a studio, you already know a lot of this stuff, but if you don't that courses that go and check that out, so we've got one light, that's really simple. This now is our fill light. So what we've done now is we've added a fill light to the shoot, but this is what I feel like looks like in the previous one was the main light. This is a fill light. What this does is the shadows on the other side of the face.
It reduces them but I wanted to show you each light by itself. Let's look at the next one. Now this is actually a rim light, but this is a hair light. There's two types of rim there's one that shines on the top of the head and the one that comes over one of the shoulders. When it comes over one of the shoulders is a rim light when it comes over the top of the head is a head Li. So that's what the hairline looks like.
And then we've got a blown out background. So we've put two flashes on the background. Just wanted to show you that this software renders speed lights Exactly. So it's really interesting. When we look at this, in fact, what I'm going to do is apply this to the stage. Let's just zoom in a bit, just gonna scroll over the top.
And you can see how I've set this up. I've got two flags, I've decided my light and I've got the two lights shining on the background. And I've got fully blown up background but let's have a look at some of the settings here. For this, I'm shooting it with a 24 105 my focal length is 105 millimeters and one 120 fifth of a second which is standard for flashing and I'm using FHA. I don't want to lose the debt fulfill on older head back to the back of their head and focus, but I've had to do to get my exposure is take my ISO up to 200. That's the position of those lights.
Let me just go back before we show you the final one because I want to show you where we put this light. Now you can see I've got the flash mounted above and high. Normally we'd have that on a boom arm attached to a wall, because we couldn't have to stand behind. So that's something else you might want to look at. If you can't do that, just stick it on a stand and do rim light from the side. Now can you imagine was talking earlier about controlling those flashes, how you're going to get to that light when the subjects in there around the back and see the settings?
One of the reasons why I'm recommending the flashes that you have. But that's the setting is really high and it just gives that wrap around the edge of the subject. Let me go back now and also look at the fill another fill as we can see is that Silver reflective umbrella that was talking about earlier. I'm shining the flash into that. And that's given a nice dispersal a big broad dispersal of light in the studio to give me that fill. So that's how it's all coming together.
So this is a five light setup that you can do very similar with four lights. If you just bought four lights, I would just remove the hair light because although it gives a nice little bit of glow to the hair, as you can see on the top and a nice little flicker light on the shoulders. isn't that important to the image we can get away with it. So I'm going to apply that to the stage. And we can see so if I just now switch that speed light off. Let's just flick back.
As you see it is not made a huge amount of difference at all. So we can lose that. And we've got our four lights set up and that is typically how you would shoot on why. But what we've also done here now is we've got the main light we've got the fill light We've got the two umbrellas all working together to give us this image and that is a pretty standard studio setup. Like I said, if you want some more advanced lighting, check out the portrait photography course and that will show you how to do a lot more stuff.