This lesson is short but covers what I think is a very important, practical concept: Standardization. This is practice of developing and using your own default light placement, camera and flash settings. The purpose of this is to cut down on the stress and guesswork you’re likely to encounter at the start of a portrait session if you don’t have your initial setup already worked out.
I’ll provide an example but I encourage you to create your own favorite setup and settings combo as a go-to starting point for most of your portrait shoots. This will likely evolve over time, and that’s fine. The point is to have a system that you can count on. Then, it takes little effort to tweak things if necessary as the shoot progresses.
Note that the settings and gear I mentioned in this video are just examples. I’ll often use other types of strobes and modifiers and my starting aperture could very well be in the neighborhood of f/8.0.