In my previous post, “Business portrait: the why”, I showed a portrait of a lady taken with the beauty lighting set up. By placing the light in front of the subject, one minimises shadows on the face. This gives the skin a smoother look in the photograph. It works very well with women, but in my opinion beauty lighting is not appropriate for men.
For portraits of male subjects, I prefer lighting set ups with more shadows on the face.
With split lighting the main light is placed to the side of the subject. I like to use a reflector on the other side in order to avoid really deep shadows. In the picture above, there are also two lights at the back of the subject to separate him from the background.
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