How to shoot portraits with continuous light sources

Continuous lights are simply lights that stay on constantly. Flashguns and other strobes only output light when triggered, and have long recycling times, but continuous lights behave like a light bulb.

Continuous lighting can be especially helpful if you’re new to working with lights. When you’re using off-camera lighting it can be tricky to get the right look. How much power do you need? Do you want soft shadows or hard ones? And what direction should the light be coming from?

Continuous lighting enables you to see the effect of a light in real time as you reposition it and adjust its power – you can watch as the shadows move across a subject’s face, or see how much glare you’re getting from a product that you’re photographing.

Don’t get us wrong: flashguns and studio strobes are great. But because their effect is transitory you have to review your images on your camera or computer to see what effect they’re having, and if you’re new to lighting this lengthens the learning process.

You can get a relatively cheap constant lighting kit that includes light stands and modifiers, and we’d recommend going with a kit to save yourself some time and money when you’re starting out.

Light stands are essential as they keep the lights steady and in position. Most kits will also include light modifiers – these are used to diffuse and direct light, and take the form of softboxes, octoboxes, umbrellas and the like.

Continuous lights also enable you to capture studio portraits with a difference: take a scarf or piece of thin fabric and drape it over your model, and use a desk fan to blow the scarf around. By using a slow shutter speed and keeping your model still, you can capture ephemeral blurred trails.

SEE MORE: Best studio lighting for photography – 8 top options tested and rated

Step by step: Set up your continuous light

1 Kit yourself out
Don’t waste your time getting different bits of kit, as you’re running the risk of incompatibility. If you want to get started, Rotolight’s RL-48 Interview Kit (£175/$250) will provide you with the essentials. For our shoot, we used KinoFlo 4-bank continuous lights.

SEE MORE: Free portrait lighting guide – 24 essential studio lighting set-ups

2 Take a test
Start by turning on one light. Move the light around and see how it affects your subject. Take a test shot, then fit a diffuser to the light (keeping it in position), take another photo and compare the two, noting how soft or harsh the shadows are and where they fall.

SEE MORE: High-key lighting – how to shoot portraits that are dominated by light

3 Get the look
To shoot our featured image, we used a so-called ‘beauty light’ set-up. We took our key (main) light and positioned it above the model, pointing down. Next, we put a large reflector below the model’s face to bounce the light up and lighten the shadows under her chin, nose and eyes.

SEE MORE: Home studio setup: 6 things every photographer needs

4 Keep it clean
Constant lighting also takes out a lot of the guesswork out of knowing how your background will look. For our shot we positioned our model against a clean white background, as we felt this would suit the simple lighting, and shallow depth of field.

SEE MORE: How to set up studio lighting: 3 classic setups for dramatically different effects

5 Go wide
To get our super-shallow depth of field, we attached a Nikon 85mm f/1.4 to our D750, and set an aperture of f/1.4 in aperture-priority mode. We then set a shutter speed of 1/250 sec at ISO100, and adjusted to power of the light for a correct exposure.

SEE MORE: A layman’s guide to depth of field: how to check and affect sharpness like a pro

6 Stay balanced
If you don’t have continuous lights, you can use standard desk lamps or similar, but just be aware that these won’t be daylight balanced (see Quick Tip below). Uncorrected, they will give your portraits a warm, slightly orange cast. The solution is to set your white balance to Incandescent.

SEE MORE: 6 white balance mistakes photographers make (and how to avoid them)

Quick tip

If you want to combine continuous lights with daylight, make sure you get daylight-balanced lights. Light is measured using the Kelvin (K) scale. Daylight is ‘white’ and lies at around 5500K, so make sure your lights are as near to that as possible to prevent issues with mixed colour casts. Our KinoFlo lights were daylight -balanced

SEE MORE: What is color temperature: free photography cheat sheet

Light meter

Another advantage of using continuous lighting is that you can use your camera’s light meter; because the light is constant there will be no change in the exposure when you take a shot. Speedlights, studio strobes and other such lights force you to either guess, or rely on an external light meter to take readings and adjust camera settings.

SEE MORE: Getting better exposures: handheld light meter vs camera metering

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