Hello guys, your mate Aries Tao here. I was asked to do an episode about minimalistic lighting setups. This light setup is basically for the people who are traveling and want a minimal setup without the softbox or umbrella, anything too intrusive, or for a run-and-gun kind of shooter. If you have a light setup with an umbrella or softbox, when the wind blows, especially on location, they tend to fall and break your light.

Here's my setup: my AD100PRO. It's basically the size of a can. I especially recommend the color edition to match with your clothes. Look at that, it's kind of fun. This can be a key light, this can be a fill light. 

And then the S200. This is my recent go-to sort of lighting setup for fill light. It's still a hard light source because it's glowing 360 degrees. The light is so even. 

I wouldn't recommend the AD100Pro on a sunny day. On a sunny day, it's more ideal to be a fill light, but on a cloudy day—yes, it's 11 am in the morning and we can still mimic a patch of sun. 

Because we're mimicking the midday sun, the shadows under her chin are harsh, which is what I want. For a lot of people, it's working already. For me personally, I like less contrast and more details in the shadow, so her skin tone looks better.

I shoot for a lot of clothing brands. They love fill lights, which brings out so much shadow detail to see the texture of the actual outfits. And this is what I do. S200 is perfect for fill lights because you just place it there. You don't have to adjust any directions. It's glowing 360 degrees. There's nothing to worry about. And here we go.

Mimic the Sun

80% of the time, what I do on a sunny day—see the sun comes in—now I just use S200 if it's the case. 

But you see, it's a cloudy day and the sun comes and goes all the time.

So rather than spend an hour here waiting for 5 minutes of sun, I decide to use AD100PRO to cast some shadows on the wall. Bear in mind it's only 100 watts. It will not create magic like AD1200Pro, which casts the whole area with beautiful sun, but you still can get away with it to cast some sun in the corner.

To cope with AD100 Pro, I use a telescope lens which is 135mm. So that way, I can focus in one area illuminated by AD100 Pro as a fake sun and use S200 to make our skin glow. And here we go.

Clamshell Lighting

Clamshell is a very classic beauty lighting. It's mostly used indoors rather than outdoors.

The reason is that it's so hard to bring a beauty dish as a key light and a softbox as a fill light at the same time on location, especially in this scenario where there are branches as a foreground. It's impossible to stick an umbrella between the tree branches. 

But with S200, you can because it's glowing 360 degrees. It's very forgiving. Regarding the light direction, I'll just stick the lights there and let them start glowing and feel like it looks beautiful. And AD100 Pro with a color gel to mimic a patch of sun, and that's it.

Here's an interesting typical wall scenario. You have this indoors or outdoors all the time. As you can see in the video, it's a bit plain. 

In lots of cases, it's good, but because it's a blue wall behind it, it has some funny blue cast. 

What I thought can be interesting is No. 1: use AD100 to mimic a patch of sun from the right, cast some shadows on Maely's body, and I will use S200 as a fill light to get rid of the blue cast over Maely's shadow details.

Hair Light+Key Light

Here's a nice street background. The problem is the sun was gone, right? It's like lots of location shoots, you can't control the weather. 

The first thing I noticed is that she doesn't have a hair light. If it's a sunny day, the sun will kiss her hair and it will look really nice. 

However, it's an overcast day, so I use AD100PRO to create these hairlights. It's optional—some guys like it, some guys don't. I'm just offering the choices. And here we go.

The second thing I noticed is her face is a bit dark. It's midday now, even on an overcast day. The light is coming from the top, so her face will be too dark. 

So I use S200 as a fill light for her face. So besides a softbox or umbrella, I think this is probably the best small light source for fill light.

Summary

So, in conclusion, today we talked about minimalistic lighting setups without softboxes or umbrellas, those larger modifiers, so we can be less intrusive. 

We did three setups, right? We did the clamshell lightings: one light on the top, either mimicking sun or key lights, one light on the bottom as a fill light, and we can have one light as a hairlight and another light as a key light for the face. We can have a light to mimic the sun because it's pretty much cloudy, to cast some interesting light and shadows on the environment, and other lights on the subject.

This is your mate Aries Tao. I hope you guys enjoyed the video. I will see you the next time.