Creating Soft Light Beauty Portraits with the Westcott FJ400

What we want is a large, soft light source. We’re using the Westcott FJ400 and their medium Octabox. I love their medium Octa, and I love their large Octa too. The key is, it’s all relative to your subject. So if you peek around here, the closer we move this to her, the softer and softer it will become, and the less contrasty and less specular it will be. That’s going to wrap around her face, creating softer shadows, which will help with pore detail and create what we’ll call beauty lighting—that’s the ultimate goal. You don’t have to use only an Octabox. There are beauty dishes you can use, but it’s really about making sure we’ve got some even, sometimes even flat, lighting to produce this.

So we’re doing two things—we’ve got two lights set up here, and we’re going to get dialed in. Of course, we’re using a light meter. I use the Sekonic Lite Master Pro L-478D-U. The name is complicated—I’d rather just call it “light meter, version two.” But no, we’ve got the Lite Master Pro L-478D-U. So, we’ll use that today and get dialed in.

I’m at ISO 200, shutter speed 200, and manual mode. When I’m in the studio using strobes, I’m always in manual mode—it just makes life easier. So, what we’re going to do is get a light meter reading here, and we’re at F4.5. But I also have a kicker light on the background. On the background, I just want a little bit of edge light to create separation, and we’re using the FJ80 II. Let’s see what we’re getting on that kicker light.

So on that, I’m getting F2—just over a stop less, maybe a stop and a half, closer to two stops less. 2.02. I’ll kick it up a little, kick it up a notch. From the trigger, I’m just going to add one more stop of light. This will probably push it to just over 2.8. Do it one more time and it’s 2.81. We’ve got 4.5, I believe it was. 2.8—so just over a one-stop difference. That’s going to be enough to give us the look we want.

So this is so important with a light meter—I can’t stress it enough. It just makes life simple. I know a lot of you want to run and gun it, and I’d be lying if I said I don’t do that sometimes too. But what I really want is to be able to get dialed in. And look, we’re not in a studio space; we’re in a living room with a backdrop up. The background is from Intuition—it’s the Tapestry, part of their new wall collection, and it is absolutely beautiful. Love what Lauren’s wearing—the tone on tone. Let’s get some killer portraits.