Photographers draw inspiration from many sources, whether it be from life, movies & television, or even other photographers. Incorporating the things that inspire us into our work can prove both fun and helpful to our journey as photographers. In this article/video, we’re going to use a three-light setup to capture romantic, stylized portraits inspired by the Netflix series Bridgerton. We’ll show you how to light and shoot similar portraits of your own, and we’ll also share our thoughts on the new Profoto D30 strobe, which we used in part to light this session.
Let’s get into it.
Video: Bridgerton-Style Photoshoot with the New Profoto D30
Gear List
Here’s a quick overview of the gear we used to create the portraits featured in this video/article.
- Profoto D30
- Profoto A10
- Profoto Connect Pro
- Profoto 3×4 Silver Softbox
- Profoto 4’ Octa Softbox
- Backdrop from Backdrops by Ethan Alex
- V-Flat from V-Flat World
- Canon R5
- Canon RF 28-70mm f/2 Lens
While it helps to have assistance from a professional stylist, make-up artist, and model, which we benefited from when creating our Bridgerton-inspired portraits, don’t let a lack of access to these resources stop you from exploring your own creative interpretations of the things that inspire you.
A Closer Look at the New Profoto D30
Let’s start by taking a look at one of the strobes we used for this shoot that made creating these portraits a breeze. The new Profoto D30 is a 500 watt-second (Ws) mono light that’s perfect for studio use, and it features all of the things that make Profoto great, including unrivaled reliability, consistency, portability, and ease of use. It basically replaces the D2 500 Ws strobe and comes in a notably smaller and lighter build, coming in just slightly larger than the Profoto B10X Plus.
Profoto D30 Flash Modes
The D30 features three different flash modes, including Eco, Boost, and Freeze, to really help photographers get the most efficient use of the flash based on their needs. Of the three modes, the most color accurate modes, Eco and Boost, only vary by 100 degrees in color temperature. When you want to freeze action, however, you can select freeze mode and get T.1 time flash duration that’s like 1/10,000th of a second, which is incredible.
Color Temperature Controlled Modeling Light
One of the other features we didn’t highlight for this particular shoot is the D30’s built-in modeling light, which offers color control (moving easily from a warm tungsten color to a bluer daylight setting) and plenty of power. Modeling lights can prove very helpful when setting up lights and placing subjects to see exactly where the light and shadows will fall.
And More
These are just a few of the features packed into the Profoto D30. You can learn more about this strobe and its powerful features here.
The Before Shot
Okay, before we jump into the lighting setup, let’s first start with a “before” shot, which is what we’d get if we just walked into the scene point-and-shoot style using only ambient lighting.
And now, we can add some lighting to create our Bridgerton-inspired portrait.
Starting with Fill Light
Whenever we set up a scene for a portrait, we often figure out the basic composition and ambient light settings for our shot first and then jump into adding our main or key light. This time around, we’re going to mix it up and set up the fill light before we add the key light. The reason for this is sometimes a scene can appear flat when we start with and focus too heavily on the key light. Instead, we’ll use the fill to add a bit of light to the scene, and from there we can start shaping that light.
Setting Up the Fill Light
We’ve placed the D30 inside a Profoto 3×4’ Silver Softbox and boomed it up a bit so that the light falls top-down to provide a basic fill light to the entire scene.
The trick when starting with fill light is to make sure that it isn’t too dark or too bright. If it’s too dark, it won’t really impact the final image, and if it’s too bright, it will compete too much with the main light. Balance is important.
We mentioned earlier that we can use lighting to create with intention. Do we want a dark and dramatic, editorial-style portrait, or something bright and airy, or somewhere in between? For these Bridgerton-styled photos, we’ll land somewhere in the middle. We set the Profoto D20 to a power level of “6” six, which gave us a great starting point. Of course, we can always make adjustments if necessary.
Adding the Main Light
So, with the fill light ready, it’s time to add the main light. We’ll use another Profoto D30 for our main light, this time in a Profoto 4’ Octa Softbox, but you can use whichever comparable strobe and modifier that you have access to.
We will position the key light at a strong angle, essentially at 90-degrees off camera, and place it very close to our subject. We’ve raised it high enough to direct the light at our subject at a slightly top-down angle. You can adjust the angle, power setting, and anything else as needed throughout the shoot.
To modify the light, we went with a Profoto 4’ Octa Softbox, which features a silver lining, and we used both the diffuser and baffle to soften the transitions between light and shadow on our subject. In addition to the results this softbox delivers, it’s also one of the easiest softboxes on the market to set up.
After snapping the test shot above, it became apparent that we should adjust the angle of the light to minimize how much light was spilling onto the backdrop. Also, we want the light to wrap around our subject to brighten her face, so we brought the power up to 6.5.
This setup might be a little bit less traditional, as we’d normally place the main light a few degrees off camera from the left or right. In this instance, however, we’re actually lighting more from the back side because we want to create a main light that comes in from the back of the scene and has a very natural sort of fill in the front.
Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the results we get with the two different positions for the main light.
Adding a V-Flat
We decided to place a V-Flat off to camera-left in order to bounce a little more light back onto our subject. It works well to kick a very subtle amount of light back into the right side shadows.
Here’s a look at the resulting images captured with and without a V-Flat:
The difference is subtle, but also noticeable, as the V-Flat kicks enough light back onto the right side to fill in the shadows a bit more.
Stacking the Fill Light
Lastly, we’re going to add a Profoto A10 (with no modifier) directly in front of the fill light. The purpose of adding this flash is to get a tiny bit of light to land right on our subject’s face. If the power is set too high, the third flash will make the image look like it was shot using only direct flash and it will create a gnarly shadow in the background. Keep that in mind when using this technique.
In the image above, we get a look at our portrait with the added kicker light.
Notice, if you zoom in, you can see that the third flash brightened the iris as well as the whites and colors in the eyes.
Adjusting the Pose
One thing to remember is if at any point you want to adjust the light on the face, you can do that in one of two ways. First, of course, you can move the light. You can also adjust the pose. That said, if we adjust our pose toward the light more, we get more of a Rembrandt light pattern. It’s usually easier to just adjust the subject’s position rather than having to adjust the lights.
Conclusion & Final Thoughts on the Profoto D30
Hopefully, following along in the process outlined above will help you create your own inspired portraits. Again, you can use whatever gear you have available to you to create shots like this, but it’s worth noting why it can be helpful to invest in high-quality gear like Profoto’s strobes and modifiers.
Beyond the obvious points of how easy Profoto’s lights and modifiers are to set up and use, they deliver consistency that you don’t find in a lot of their competitor’s products. When we took these images into Lightroom, we could see with a simple scan through the RAW images how well the new D30 performed. Even while we moved our subject around and adjusted our light position, the D30 delivered consistent results throughout. In addition, what you don’t see in the images but what you feel while you’re creating them is the fast recycle times, which allow you to shoot quickly through a series of poses and expressions without having to worry about missing a shot.
So, that said, the light performed exceptionally well. From its simple, easy-to-use menu system to its stellar results, the Profoto D30 came through like a champ. It’s a worthwhile investment to consider when you’re looking to get a new set (or your first set) of professional strobes for the studio.
