Inside our low-key studio setup, and why we keep coming back to a single light.
Most of our studio portraits are made with one light. It sits high and to one side, shaped by a deep umbrella, with a black backdrop far enough behind the subject that it falls away to nothing.
A single light makes decisions for you. It carves out the shape of a face and lets everything else fall into shadow, which is exactly where the distractions go.
The rest is time. The first twenty minutes of any portrait session are a warm-up; the photographs people love almost always come after they forget they are being photographed.
