Chris © Tim Pannell Photography

Would you like to be able to shoot beautiful portraits of your kids instead of going to some schmaltzy cookie cutter photo joint in the mall?  So many people settle for these kind of “one size fits all” portraits because they don’t think they can afford to go to a real portrait photographer’s studio.

Assuming you already have a decent digital SLR camera, you could buy some lighting equipment for the same price or less than you’d spend having a legitimate portrait photographer do the work for you.

There are quite a few common misconceptions about photography and equipment and the kind of lighting power someone might need to do simple portraits.

I do use pretty expensive lighting for all of my commercial work, but for simple portraits I have to dial my strobes to their absolute lowest output and many times that’s still too much light for my needs and I end up diffusing the light source another 1 – 2 stops.

This image of my friends’ son was shot in my living room using one main light and 2 accent lights or “kicker lights”.

You can produce this kind of lighting setup easily against a paper background, or even a wall in your home.

I shot it a f 2 @ 1/200th of a second with an 85 mm f1.4 lens on a Canon Mark II body.  I exposed for the diffused highlights on Chris’ face and then adjusted my “kicker lights” until I got the highlights the way I wanted them.

I frequently shoot wide open or close to it because I like the ethereal quality it gives the overall image.  It’s a great illustration of the concept that not everything in an image has to be or should necessarily be tack sharp.

This is very similar to how the human eye works as well.  Not everything you look at is sharp.  A relatively small area in your field of vision is actually sharp and then everything else falls off rather quickly into being out of focus.

There are quite a few inexpensive lighting setups out on the market that have more than enough power to produce images like this.  Do your research before you buy any of them, make sure they have good warrantees and that the company has been around more than a couple of months.

The great thing about digital is that once you have the camera and lenses, it costs you nothing to shoot and experiment.  With film you could spend thousands and thousands of dollars playing around with lighting setups until you found something that you really liked.

The creative possibilities that we now have at our fingertips because of digital cameras and photoshop are endless.  One word of caution though……don’t use photoshop as a crutch.

It’s still just as important today as it was decades ago to become a master at lighting and exposure control even though it’s easy to “fix” things in post.

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