While visiting friends and family in London over the Christmas in 2025 I was asked to do some headshots for a young professional working in the Beauty Industry. Naturally, given the high profile environment, the normal corporate headshot simply will not do. Additionally, the client's role in the organisation is commercial and client facing, so these headshots will most likely be the first impression she makes on the customers she works with. With my remit established, I began to scheme how I can add an additional dose of 'pizzazz' whilst retaining those all important clean professional qualities.
Performing a photoshoot internationally, and in unfamiliar territory poses a number of challenges, thereby necessitating the need to work with what you've got. Luckily, what I brought was my compact, portable off-camera flash, collapsable stands and flash-modifier kit. Having some control of the lighting conditions is paramount to consistency, and being able to generate the aesthetically pleasing soft light and shadow regions across the face that characterises any professional headshot!
Read on for details on how achieved these shots, and the equipment and techniques I employed in doing so.
The Scene
Anyone who has ever lived in the UK will know that to be blessed with a full day of sunshine in the middle of December is a rare feat indeed! Undeterred and with a date set, I decided that what I wanted to do to give these headshots that extra dose of glamour was to employ the low-winter-sun that barely creeps over the horizon at this time of year and use the warm golden glow to backlit the client's hair, casting a soft 'halo-like' affect.
Luckily, our location was blessed with a south-facing private roof terrace affording enough space to manoeuvre the flash, subject and myself into position so that I can get a variety of different perspectives. Also, given out location was very close to the centre of London, in the Borough of Islington, I'm very pleased I brought the Sony 135mm G-Master lens with me, with an very bright maximum aperture of f-1.8, those busy city backdrops melted away into a beautiful bokeh delight!
Equipment & Setup
Despite only having my big Manfrotto backpack, and a single large suitcase, I'd managed to travel with quite a setup for portable portraiture. And, as I'll demonstrate later, it helps to have a few helpful supporting hands too!
What I used: - Godox X3 Pro Trigger - Godox AD400 Pro - Godox AD S85 Soft box - Godox Gold Foldable Reflector Dish - Collapsible Studio Light Stand - Sony A7RV Body - Sony 135mm f1.8GM Lens, & Sony 50mm f1.2 GM Lens
I am definitely a fan of the portrait lighting style characterised by the Dutch painter Rembrandt, and subsequently bears his name to this day. Rembrandt lighting is characterised by a single light source illuminated the face so as to have half the face fully illuminated, and the shadow from the brow and nose of the subject partially obscuring the other half of the face, leaving a characteristic 'triangle' of light on the cheek.
I find the technique adds a timeless and elegant quality to portraits, whilst also providing a pleasing, but not too much dose of interest from the contrasting shadow and light areas. Additionally, it's a very flattering lighting style, the shadow regions serve to accentuate cheekbones and jawlines, while the soft flash smooths out the appearance of skin imperfections.
So, how does one go about producing the Rembrandt style in a portrait? To help illustrate the technique I've produced a handy little diagram defining the layout and equipment provided. The reflector dish is optional, I had help and wanted some additional warm in-fill light to compliment the flash from the key light. First and foremost is the key light placement with respect to the subject. Place the key light to one side, at approximately a 45-Degree angle from the subject. Then, adjust the key light's height so that it is pointing down at a roughly 45-Degree angle again. This combination will create the half illuminated-triangle-cheek pattern we're going for!
With a very brief explainer on the technique out of the way, what did I do to get these fantastic (if I do say so myself!) backlit portraits?
Firstly, subject placement. I'd positioned my subject to stand so that the sun was behind her, but not directly. Just offset enough so that the direct light of the sun was casting a soft glow catching the edges of her hair. Originally I wanted her head directly behind and obscuring the sun, which would have created a halo-like rim-light effect. Alas, the space to work and the sun's orientation didn't support this setup.
With subject placed, the next task was lighting setup. This was made much easier with the help of two enlisted friends, one to hold the key light and soft box, which given the lightweight stand has a habit of being easily blown over, was very helpful. While the other held the golden reflector dish low, catching reflected light and casting it upwards onto the subject's face to provide some warm in-fill lighting opposite to the key light.
And, that's basically it! Reposition subject, lights, try some different poses. Rinse and repeat! Read on for a brief flash explainer, camera settings and some posing tips!
Flash! Saviour of the Universe?
When it comes to flash photography, you'll soon learn that there is an upper limit to the shutter speed you can use when photographing with flash, and that value is usually 1/250th of a second for most full-frame modern mirrorless sensors. You see, the shutter at higher speeds starts to act like a moving slit, creating lines of dark and light exposures on the sensor.
This presents somewhat of a problem when shooting in daylight... I want to use a wide open aperture to melt away the busy background in dreamy bokeh goodness, ISO can only go so low... therefore, a properly exposed image requires a much higher shutter speed. There are two ways around this, the first is by far the best, but comes at quite the steep cost, and the second has compromises and what I inevitably utilised.
The first solution? Leaf shutters! Ever fawned after a Hasselblad? Well, if you have you'll have seen the lofty prices of everything. Partly because they require leaf shutters on each lens (there's no shutter in the body!), and partly because they're fond of those massive Medium Format Sensors. Anyways, leaf shutters expose the whole of the sensor evenly allowing for pure mechanical flash sync all the way up to whatever the mechanical limit of the shutter is, up to 1/8000th of a second! Most cameras feature a "Focal-Plane Shutter". What does that mean? Basically, the shutter is composed of tiny blades that rise and fall to expose light to the sensor. So what's the other solution? High-Speed-Sync (often abbreviated to HSS).
Sounds cool, right? So why did I say leaf-shutters were the best? Well, it comes down to how the HSS works. Instead of your flash blasting a single pulse of light at the power setting you tell it to, it emits a series of flash pulses, all timed to match up with the movement of your camera's shutter. What does this mean for the end result? Well, when your flash pulses rapidly, it's simply not able to provide as much flash power to the scene. Newer flashes have improved a lot to reduce the gap in performance between normal flash sync, and HSS. But the delta remains.
So what does one do to avoid purchasing a very expensive leaf-shutter system, or using HSS? Use Neutral Density (ND) filters to reduce the light further, allowing sub-1/250th of a second shutter speeds. Well, I did bring an ND10 filter with me, alas it was far too dark for me to use a reasonable shutter speed, so HSS it was! Thankfully, even with HSS, the Godox pumps out plenty of flash power!
Camera Settings
As mentioned earlier, I really wanted to melt the background away with some delicious bokeh goodness, so naturally, a wide aperture was key! Here's my Camera Settings:
While I love all the lenses in my arsenal, I am always amazed by the sharpness and detail whenever I pick up my 50mm f1.2 (especially) and the 135mm f1.8 lenses from Sony. I did try the 50mm, but even with an f1.2 aperture, the background was still too present for my liking. And, if you have the working distance, honestly, the 135mm is such an incredible portrait lens!
- Camera Body: Sony A7RV - Lens: Sony 135mm f1.8 G-Master
Flash Settings
My camera body, flash trigger and flash itself all support "Through The Lens" or TTL. TTL is wonderful, greatly simplifying the flash exposure settings. And, if you're only dealing with one, or two key lights, then you can reliably set your TTL EV compensation level and snap away! Multi-key light, ambient, and back light setups would most definitely benefit from manually dialled in flash power levels to achieve the look you want, but for a single light portrait setup, TTL worked a dream!
- Flash EV: 0 - HSS: On
Just by bumping up, or lowering the TTL EV value, and seeing how these look is all you need. And after some test shots I'd decided that the 0 EV setting gave the level of illumination I needed to compliment the backlight from the sun without casting strong shadows. You'll also have noticed my shutter speed of 1/3200th of a second, and that also means HSS was enabled on both the trigger and flash unit. Which also means, despite HSS reducing maximum light output, the Godox AD400 Pro was more than capable of illuminating in bright direct sunlight!
And that's the end of the post! So to end, here are a couple of fun behind the scenes photos of the posing process and hair touch ups. Inevitable when shooting outside and the wind picks up out of nowhere!
