At A Glance

• Pattern: Short side lighting from a big soft source, with a gridded kiss light coming back from behind.
• Mood: Dark and moody, a bit of sass, but with the laughter still sitting in the eyes.
• Lights Used: Two Elinchrom FIVE heads. A 1m square softbox as the key, and a 30cm x 1m gridded strip as the kiss.
• Difficulty: Easy to build, fiddly to finish. The setup takes five minutes and the last ten percent takes the rest.
• Space Needed: Around 6m of depth. The subject sits over 2m off the paper and I’m another 3.5m back from her.
• Ideal For: Portraits where you want drama without losing the person underneath it.

The Finished Portrait

It’s a quiet picture that’s doing something slightly contradictory. The light is low-key and the background is nearly gone, so everything says serious, and then the expression arrives and undercuts it. That’s the bit I was after. Anybody can make a dark portrait look moody. Making one look moody and still like a person you’d want to have a drink with is harder.

The short side lighting does most of the work. Because the light falls on the narrower side of the face from where I’m standing, the far cheek drops away and the face gets shape rather than just illumination. And because the source is big and close, the transition from lit to unlit is gradual. That softness is what keeps it from tipping into something harsh and theatrical.

Before And After

Straight out of camera it’s a colour frame with a proper amount of tone in the background, which is exactly what I want to hand to Photoshop. The black and white was a happy accident. I tried it, loved it, kept it. Sometimes it works like that.

The subject has some skin texture from childhood acne and, with her agreement, we reduced it in EVOTO AI, taking care to keep it looking like skin rather than plastic. I also cleaned up a strand of hair lying across her arm that kept pulling my eye. Everything else stayed.

Lighting Setup – Overview

The key is camera left, a 1m square softbox on an Elinchrom FIVE, sitting about 1.2m from the subject and raised so it’s looking down at her from a bit under 1.8m. That puts it around ten o’clock as she sees it, and high enough to put a proper shadow under the nose without dropping the eyes into darkness. I feather it back slightly so a little spill runs past her and lifts the paper. Black paper lifts more nicely than black velvet, which just eats everything and leaves you with a hole.

The second light is what I call the kiss. It’s a 30cm x 1m gridded strip on the other FIVE, camera right, but set back behind her at about four o’clock and pointing back toward the camera. It’s close, under a metre, lifted to around 1.4m, and run very low. Its whole job is a thin edge on the hair and across the shoulder.

The white studio walls do the fill, which is why there’s no third light and no flat.

Lighting Diagrams & Notes

• Camera position: About 3.5m back from the subject, roughly head height or a touch below. My notes say 0.84m, which reads lower than the picture suggests, so treat it as her eye line or just under and adjust to taste.
• Subject position and orientation: Standing, turned away from the key so the light falls on the short side of the face, head brought back round to camera.
• Key light: Elinchrom FIVE, 1m square softbox, no grid. Camera left at about ten o’clock, around 1.2m from the subject, raised to roughly 1.8m so it’s angled down about 45 degrees. EV4 on the Elinchrom scale. Feathered back a touch so some spill reaches the paper.
• Fill light: None. The white walls are the fill.
• Kicker / rim: Elinchrom FIVE, 30cm x 1m gridded strip. Camera right and behind her at about four o’clock, under a metre away, raised to around 1.4m. EV1 to EV2, so two to three stops under the key.
• Hair light: None separately. The kiss light does that job.
• Background light: None.
• Background: Black paper, with the subject a little over 2m in front of it.
• Reflectors / flags / room influence: No reflectors and no flags. White walls bouncing light back into the shadow side, and that bounce is the reason the second light exists at all.
• Notes on feathering / spill control / grids: The grid on the strip is there because it’s pointing back toward the lens, so without it you’ll pick up flare across the front element. The key stays ungridded on purpose, because that little bit of spill onto the paper is what stops the background going dead.

Camera & Settings

• Camera body: Nikon Z9
• Lens & focal length: Nikkor Z 70-200mm f/2.8, worked around the longer end
• Aperture: f/11, opened to f/10 once I’d seen the histogram
• Shutter speed: 1/160 sec
• ISO: 100
• White balance: Daylight, around 5000K

These sit right on the sweet spot. 1/160 at f/11 kills any ambient light in the room, so what you see is entirely what the strobes are doing, and it lets both heads run in their mid-range rather than at the extremes. On a plain paper background depth of field barely matters, so I’m choosing f/11 for the lens rather than for the look. Most lenses are at their sharpest somewhere around f/9 to f/11 anyway.

One honest note. We had the studio lights up for filming, and I don’t like working that way. Normally the studio is dark and the Elinchrom modelling lights give me a live preview of the finished picture, so I can see the shape before I press anything. With the room lit you lose that entirely, and you end up shooting, checking, adjusting, shooting again. More test frames than I’d normally need. That’s no excuse for not getting it spot on, but it’s why the build takes longer on camera than it would on a normal day.

Pose, Expression & Direction

She’s standing, turned maybe 45 degrees away from the key, with her hands brought up to her chest to give the arms something to do and stop the shoulders squaring off. Head comes back round toward the lens, chin dropped a fraction, shoulder lifted slightly on the near side.

The expression is the bit worth practising. I keep the energy high all the way through, chatting and laughing, and then make a deliberate decision to bring it down a beat before I shoot. What you want is the mood on the face with the amusement still behind the eyes. Ask for moody from a standing start and you’ll get a blank stare. Bring it down from laughter and you get something with a person in it.

Step-By-Step Setup Guide

1. Roll down black paper and put your subject a good couple of metres in front of it. That gap is what keeps the background dark and stops their shadow landing on it.
2. Set the key up on the side that suits their hair and their face, about a metre or so away, raised so it’s looking down at around 45 degrees. Check which side their hair naturally falls to before you commit. I normally work camera right out of pure habit and the shape of my studio, and this time the face wanted the other side.
3. Balance your exposure with the aperture, ISO and flash power together rather than reaching for the power dial on its own. Get a clean frame with nothing clipped at either end, and check the histogram rather than the back of the screen.
4. Feather the key back a touch until a little spill lands on the paper. You’re not lighting the background, you’re just stopping it dying.
5. Bring the kiss light in behind them on the opposite side, gridded, pointing back toward you. Start it far lower than you think and creep up. It should read as an edge, not a second key.
6. Lift or lower the kiss until it catches the hair and the top of the shoulder. Moving it beats turning it up. I lifted mine a couple of inches and that was the whole fix.
7. Shoot, laugh, bring the mood down, shoot again. Stop when you’ve got it rather than when you’ve run out of ideas.

Common Problems & Quick Fixes

• The background has gone completely black and looks like a hole. Feather a little more key onto it, or move your subject a touch closer to the paper. A background with some tone in it gives you something to work with later.
• Flare washing across the frame. That’s the kiss light finding your front element. Put a grid on it, angle it further back, or flag it. This is the most common thing that goes wrong with this setup.
• The rim light is shouting. Turn it down a stop and then another. If you can obviously see a second light, it’s too strong. It should read as separation rather than as lighting.
• The shadow side of the face has gone too dark. Your walls aren’t as helpful as mine. Bring the subject closer to a wall, or put a white flat in on the shadow side before you reach for a third light.
• The eyes look dead. Your key is probably too high. Drop it until you get a catchlight sitting in the upper part of the iris.
• A hard shadow on the background behind them. They’re too close to the paper. Walk them forward.

Post-Production Recipe

Global tone and colour. Start from a clean capture with nothing clipped. Set the black point so the background reads dark but still has tone in it, and lift the midtones on the face slightly.

Skin. EVOTO AI for the skin work, with the sliders kept well back. The aim is to reduce texture, not remove it. Skin that has stopped looking like skin is worse than the thing you were trying to fix, every time.

Local adjustments. A small amount of dodging on the eyes and along the jawline, and a touch of burning on the shadow side to keep the falloff going in the right direction.

Distractions. Clone out anything the eye keeps returning to. Here it was a strand of hair lying across the arm. (Removing stray bits of hair and the corner of a light stand is STILL the bulk of my retouching after all these years, and I’m not sure whether that’s reassuring or not.)

Black and white. Nik Silver Efex if you want a proper conversion rather than a desaturate. This one wasn’t planned, I just tried it and it was better than the colour. Keep both, you can always change your mind.

Developing This Setup Further

• Turn the subject the other way and light the broad side of the face instead. It’s a completely different picture from the same two lights, and it suits a narrower face better than a wider one.
• Take the kiss light away entirely and put a white flat where it was. You lose the edge and gain a softer, quieter version. Worth shooting both while everything is set up.
• Swap the square softbox for something smaller and further away if you want the falloff to happen faster and the whole thing to get harder.
• Add a second kiss on the other side for a symmetrical rim. It’s a bolder look and it goes wrong more easily, so watch the flare.
• Swap the black paper for grey and you’ve got a mid-key version of the same portrait without touching the lights.
• Optional: mirror the whole thing to the other side if your space prefers it. The main directions above assume key camera left, but there’s nothing sacred about that. Follow the hair and the face.

Where I Use This In Real Life

• Personal branding and actor headshots where somebody wants something with a bit of weight to it rather than a white-background corporate shot.
• Teenagers and young adults, who almost always want moody and almost never want to be told to look moody.
• Anyone with good hair. The kiss light is doing a lot of the work here and it pays back most on a subject with texture to catch.
• Not my first choice for family groups or anything with more than two people in it. The falloff is rapid and keeping several faces in the good part of it gets difficult very quickly.
• Not ideal in a small or dark-walled room either, because the fill is coming from the walls. Take those away and you’ll need a flat or a third head.