Lighting Headshots

[Joshwells]

This is an article I wrote for the blog I've just started over at UV Filter Monocles, I've only just started and haven't found much of an audience just yet so I'd like to post this here so a few people might find it helpful. This is part one, the practical part of a two part article I'm soon to put up about shooting headshots for actors, businesses or models. Thank you for reading.

Headshots feature prominently in newspaper, commercial and street photography. For a long time after seeing the photographs from Peter Hurley and Martin Schoeller I wanted to shoot nothing more than headshots, and why not? You have the opportunity to present someone's personality in it's simplest and perhaps purest form, the eyes showed only genuine emotion and it all relied on how you worked with the model and how you make them react. This much psychology may daunt some but I saw it as a great challenge.

And I'm not going to lie, for this reason a lot of my early headshots were awkward and uninspiring. So in this article we'll have a look at firstly how to get a headshot looking good and secondly, how to get the best out of your model.

How to take headshots:

This is mostly up to your artistic style as a photographer. I believe that the most important parts of the image to emphasise are the eyes and the expression, I like to achieve this through using an entirely black or white background, you're welcome to use other colours but I find black and white tend to carry the least connotations and work as more of a blank canvas to highlight the subject's emotions.

Black background:

Black backgrounds generally give a more solemn atmosphere which I like to think gives the photo an elegant look. It is the easier of the two, and can be constructed anywhere with a soft light source as we explored earlier in the "Accentuating light falloff" tutorial.

To create a black background with an actual black or gray background, bring the subject and the lights as far from the background as you can manage and use a telephoto lens to compress the subject and background. In general I recommend a telephoto lens for standard headshots so to not distort your subject's features. If light is still spilling onto your background and you can't bring the subject closer to the lights you can flag them in the direction of the background, or feather them towards the subject, just make sure you're using a lens hood or you may have to flag the light in the opposite direction for it to not spill onto the lens.

You can use any amount of lights for a black background, from simply a one light setup, a two light setup with one main and one fill, or three or four light setups with rim or hair lights.

If you're interested in metering, photographic black is 4 1/3 stops below 18% grey, this does not matter as much to black as it does to white backgrounds however, as there are no consequences is over darkening a background like there are in overexposing too strongly.

White background:

White backgrounds are more playful and (obviously) light than black backgrounds, and work well with less serious expressions. Because of this it is more common in commercial and actor's headshots. Now to shoot with a seamless white background you can do the Clay Enos and shoot entirely in natural light or you can set up strobes indoors.

Before anything I highly recommend giving the lens and possibly the sensor a thorough clean as this background exposes all, and you may be in for a bit of a surprise during post production, for this entire set I had to clone the same hair out from the right corner of every shot.

Using studio lighting is harder but gives more control, it requires balancing both the background and the subject. It's worth remembering that photographic white is 2 and 1/3 stops above 18% gray, which is what your camera meters for, so to meter the background first you can set the background light 2 1/3 stops above the key light and meter the subject at 18% (The standard for light meters and cameras).

There are a hundred different ways to set up a white background with two or more lights, and here's the one I've mostly used, largely limited by the small space of the studio.

This is the way I have shot most of my seamless white shots but it is not the definitive solution, some of the issues with this setup are the spill from the background light onto the subject, and further there are issues where the background light may not cover the entire background evenly. If you have more available space I would recommend flagging the space on the side between the background and the umbrellas, as well as adding a modified (Perhaps a soft box angled up or another umbrella) to the background light for a more even fill.

Further Reading:

Peter Hurley's video filmed by Fstoppers.com is exquisite, we'll go into what Peter calls his "banter" in part 2

Clay Enos also has a video where he shows not only a very easy white background setup, but how to engage with your model or client.

Finally, Dean Collins has another fantastic video on lighting backgrounds. This is also where I got the photographic white and black from.