Using a Laptop as a Key Light for a Self Portrait

In the endless pursuit of soft light sources to use for our next portrait, you might be ignoring a fun little option that is right underneath your nose.

No, I’m not talking about your moustache. This post is about using a laptop to light your portrait photos.

Finding the Light

This is a shot I’ve wanted to do for a while but haven’t. My excuse for not doing it earlier is because it’s such a remarkably simple shot. For the record, this is a terrible excuse, but I think it’s valid.

Repurposing things to use them as a light source is an activity that is much more fun than it sounds. Open Microsoft Word and you have a large, clean, fairly soft light source. Simply flip off the rest of the lights in the room and your low key portrait is ready to go.

To have the background fall off into darkness (like in the example), you’ll need to make sure there is a bit of distance to objects or the wall behind the subject.

The quality of your camera really doesn’t matter much here. What matters more is a steady tripod. For these pictures, I shot at 1/15, f2,8, ISO 400 with the 50mm 1.8.

If you are shooting in RAW and have a grey card, make sure to fire off a shot while holding it in front of your face. This way you can take the reading off the grey card to correct the white balance on your pictures.

Dealing with glasses

If you are photographing someone who has glasses, this means two things:

  1. Their eyes suck. Clearly they got the short straw in the genetic lottery. They should express their thankfulness on a daily basis that we have options like glasses and laser eye surgery in this modern era because if they existed in the early days of humanity, having poor eyesight would no doubt mean their early death; and
  2. Even more horrifying than #1, it’s going to be slightly more difficult to take this picture without having the light reflect off the glasses. You may need to experiment with different head tilts to find a pose where the light from the screen isn’t reflecting right back into the camera.

Before and After

Here’s the before picture:

It’s definitely a bit under-exposed. There was a wall pretty close behind me and I wanted to make sure I didn’t light that up and kill my background. The colours that came off the camera’s automatic white balance were also much bluer than in real life.

These issues are fixed quickly enough, since we shot in RAW. I also boosted clarity on my sweater to make the texture jump out a bit.

You may need to use adjustment brushes to clean up the exposure here and there. In this case, my face was lit a bit too much by the screen, so a quick swipe with an adjustment brush balanced it to the rest of the picture nicely.

After 3 minutes of editing and a quick adjustment to the crop, we have this as our final shot:

If you want to get more fancy, you could certainly drop a flash behind your subject and get a nice rim light and separate them from the background.

So there you have it. If you find yourself short on fancy photography lighting equipment, pull out your laptop and voila! A wonderful portrait that you can use as your desktop background if you’re into that meta wallpaper sort of thing.

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