I’ve been shooting for a long time now, but there are always some lighting setups that I’ve never gotten around to shooting. I’m sure we all have ideas for setups that may languish in an ‘inspiration folder’ somewhere on our hard drive and this hanging lightbulb shot was certainly one of them for me.

There’s nothing too tricky about this shot which is nice, but it did involve a little prep work as it requires a few unique items that I ultimately made myself to get the look I wanted. Again, this wasn’t too tricky and you can do it fairly cheaply if you cut the occasional corner like I did.

The Setup

As always, let’s jump into the shot we’re looking to achieve and then I’ll go over exactly how I achieved it and share some of the problems I encountered so you won't have to. I’ll also do my best to provide alternative options for as many of the items used as I can. I know we’re in this transition period right now where many of us have moved on to LEDs but there’s certainly a huge number of people still using strobes and I’ll do my best to offer up solutions to those that are.

Click on any of the images above to enlarge them

TL;DR/ADHD/Artist Setup Explanation

Suspend your lightbulbs around the subject
Place key light just out of shot in front of subject - set to 10,000K
Add hair light on opposite side behind subject - set to 2000K
Set camera to ~5000K

What You Will Need

Key-light - You can use whatever your preference for portrait key-light is here, but a beauty dish is ideal if you're shooting with strobes, or like me, I simply used the diffusion dome on my Rotolight AEOS 2 Pro light as it provides gorgeous soft light that is extremely controllable when brought in very close to the subject like this.

Hair-light - Again, you have plenty of scope to use what you’d normally use for a hair-light here. If you're shooting with strobes then an optical snoot will give a lot of fine control of exactly where the light will fall. Failing that, a gridded reflector dish or even barn doors on a reflector dish will work.

Dark Backdrop - I used a hand-painted backdrop here, but it turned out there wasn’t enough light in most of the images to actually see any texture on it. This was fine and I didn’t want it to be distracting anyway. If you don’t have a hand-painted backdrop, any dark grey backdrop will be absolutely fine here, but I'd avoid black.

Assortment of Vintage-Stye Bulbs - These are the only somewhat unique items in this setup. I did end up making all of the hanging bulbs myself and if I can do it, I assure you, you can do it too. I’ll outline the DIY method I used below.

A Lot of Haze - This is somewhat optional, but I really do recommend you try and add some atmosphere to your shot in some way. I used a smoke machine (AKA SmokeNINJA), but a normal smoke machine can also work. Alternatively, if smoke really isn’t an option for you, you can choose to use lens filters to get a very similar effect and I’ll discuss those later on as well.

Camera Settings

Camera - Nikon D850
Lens - I used a lot of lenses on this setup, but I recommend a longer lens like an 85mm or 105mm
Shutter Speed - 1/50th (I’ll explain why later on)
Aperture - f2.8
ISO - ~50
Kelvin - 5000K
Focal Length - 50 - 105mm

You should notice that a lot of these camera settings are all over the place and that’s simply due to how much I was experimenting with when I was shooting with so many older, vintage-style lenses. That said, I have outlined the starting settings that I recommend you begin with.

The Results

Click to enlarge any of the shots below.

Model: Lucia Kosta

Makeup: Tumsilt Makeup

Designer: Jolanta Pilinkaite Designs

Breaking it Down

DIY Hanging Bulbs

I think it’s safe to say that the hanging bulbs are the star of this particular show, but most of you won't have a bunch of these vintage bulbs on strings (I’m resisting the urge to say ‘hanging about’ here). I was the same, so I looked at how to make them myself. Here are the steps I went through to make mine.

1. How many do I need? - I actually mocked up this lighting setup using the 3D studio tool Set.a.light3D (that produced the 3d render you just saw above) and from there I was able to work how many bulbs I would need to fill the frame with a certain about of depth in mind. I landed on 7 bulbs, but seeing as one was often hidden behind the model, you could get away with 6.

2. What should the bulbs look like? - This would seem obvious, but trust me, there are so many options when you search ‘vintage style bulbs. I got mine from eBay as they were the cheapest place I found with reasonable shipping times, but there were a couple of factors I wanted to consider when actually deciding.

Firstly ‘cost’, I was buying 7 of them so I did want to be sensible with the individual price.

Secondly, the size of them. I knew these bulbs were going to be ‘in-shot’ so I didn’t want them to be tiny little fairly-light looking things. Alternatively, I knew they couldn’t be too big as I wanted the model amongst them.

Ultimately I landed on the old ‘T10 E27 40W RC’. A real classic bulb to be sure and although I don’t need to explain why this is such a fan favourite to your refined selves, I will just briefly go over the aforementioned Enigma code for the uncultured few still in the dark.

The T10 was perfect due to the fact that it was long enough to make an impact in shot, but not so wide that it would give the model third-degree burns every time she breathed in and out.

The other core reason was it being very good value at £1.45 per bulb from China and as long as you’re prepared to wait a little bit for it to arrive, you wont finder a better deal than that.

The E27 simply refers to it being screw fit and this is important to remember when purchasing your holders.

40W refers to the fact that its 40 watts. This isn’t too important, other than that you’ll need to remember that fact if one of these bulbs accidentally and immediately breaks as soon as you remove it from the packet and need to urgently buy another bulb from a closer seller that also sells 60w versions. FML!

Pro Tip: Buy more than 7 bulbs on your initial purchase!!!!

3. Bulb Housing - Again, this feels like it’ll be obvious, but once again there are a million and one options. I went for …. wait for it… the cheapest one I could find.

Again, we’re buying 7 of them so I wanted to keep it cost-effective whilst still looking somewhat cool. And by cool I mean it didn’t look bright white and plastic…. I got halfway there. Sadly, the sexy-looking metal ones were considerably more expensive so I decided to leave it and just go for the black plastic, clean-looking design.

7 of these cost about £20

4. Cables - I’m sure you’ve worked out a running theme in my choices here, but yes, once again I tried to do this as cheaply as possible, so cheap in fact that I actually made my life considerably harder in the process. Let me explain. I knew the cables would be hanging in shot, so I didn’t want some dirty old white plastic cable dangling there, so instead I went for that cool-looking braided vintage-style cable. Unsparingly this is more expensive than your regular fridges extension cord so I decided to buy enough ‘fancy’ cable to hang in-shot and then splice it into cheaper crappy cable for the sections that were out of shot.

I purchased 10m of the vintage-style cable for £21 and 10m of the flat black flex for ~£7. Like I said, that cheap cable, really was a lot cheaper.

5. Cable Joiner - One extra expense in splicing the cables like this was a cable connector. I'd have to splice the 2 cables on all 7 strings and to do that I needed a cable connector/joiner. Thankfully these are very cheap.

I got mine for ~£3.

6. Plugs - Lastly, I of course needed plugs to actually plug all of these hanging bulbs into the wall. I’m sure there is a far better solution to the one that I had, namely, I just purchased 7 plugs for all 7 of my hanging bulbs, but I’m sure the more electrically minded among you will know of some way to attach all these stings to fewer plugs.

The one major benefit of making them all separately like this though, is that you have the ability to split each of the cables up and run them exactly where you want them. As you can see from the BTS above, there was a lot of messy cabling involved to string everything above the model and then back down to the floor and then to the power. So with that said, I still think I prefer having the separate plugs to give me that flexibility when arranging the bulbs, even though there is ultimately a lot of plugs to deal with.

I purchased 10x 13 amp plugs for ~£10

Total Cost*

Vintage Style Bulbs x7 = £10.75
Vintage Style Bulbs (spares) x2 = £3.33
Vintage-Style Fabric Cable 10m = £21.34
Regular Black Electrical Wire 10m = £6.97
Retro Bulb Holders x7 = £19.98
Cable Connector Block = £2.85
Electrical Tape = £1.95

TOTAL = £67.17

*Pricing as of 2023

The DIY Part

These steps aren’t very tricky, but they are fairly time-consuming when you have to do everything 7 times. You don't need any special tools either and a screwdriver will cover it. That said, I did end up buying a wire-stripper after the first couple of strings as that made stripping the scores of wires far faster.

Connecting the wires

As I’m a cheapskate and decided to buy nice wire for only half the setup, I had to splice the cheap stuff onto the nice stuff. To do this, simply use your wire connector and attach the vintage-style cable on one side and the regular flex on the other side. Just be sure to match the coloured wires on both sides. I then recommend wrapping the entire block in black electrical tape so it doesn’t look like a completely lethal fire hazard to the model and team when on set!

Wiring up the Bulb Holder

Again, this is fairly straightforward and you just have to strip the plastic sleeve off of the cable and attach it to the corresponding screw and then tighten everything back up. Many of these bulb holders will also have a tightening screw on the tip where the cable enters. Once everything is in place, be sure to tighten up that screw as it will take the weight of the bulb and not your connecting wires inside.

Attaching the Plug

Lastly, we just need to attach the plug. Again, nothing tricky here, it is just time-consuming. Just make sure you’re attaching the right colours to the right pins.

Disclaimer: Just in case it wasn’t abundantly clear, I am not an electrician and I do not claim to be able to advise you on any of this. You wire all of this together at your own risk.

Things to consider

Suspending the Bulbs

The setup itself is pretty straightforward, after all, I’m sure most of you have shot a portrait with a key and hair light before. The trickiest part for me was getting the bulbs to look good in the framing. I had 7 bulbs to think about and I wanted to showcase depth in the shot, meaning I wanted to have some bulbs close to the camera and some further away. Again, in principle this is easy, but I also logistically really only had 2 crossbars to suspend them from so the depth was managed via two bars crossing each other above the model and placing the bulbs along the length of them in a random way to make it look visually pleasing.

In the images above you can see that I clamped all 7 lights to only 2 crossbars. I would then place them in position and adjust the height of the bulbs to give them a more random look. This process will be easier if you have several additional crossbars or booms to attach the bulbs to. Regardless, I recommend getting this as close to in place before the talent actually stands there as this will take some back and forth.

One other aspect that is painfully obvious from the images above is how short the cables ended up being and you can see extension leads hanging from the stands as a result. This miscalculation happened due to me planning on having this rig closer to the ground. As it turned out, the model was taller and wore heels and I wanted the option to shoot wider if need be and I didn’t want to see the crossbars above if I did. If you can, maybe consider getting more of the cheap flex cable and making all of your strings longer to give yourself more options.

Choosing the White Balance

The white balance choice in this shot is crucial to the final image and in my opinion, failing to carefully consider what all of the lights and camera is set to will result in a very different image.

If we quickly recap the white balance settings we had:

Camera: 5000K
Key-Light: 10,000K
Hair-Light: 2000K
Bulbs: 2000K

With the camera set to ~5000K it makes the key-light on the model appear blue due to it being set to 10,000K. That is nicely contrasted by all the other Kelvin colours in the image as the hair-light is set to 2000K along with the hanging bulbs which are naturally 2000K.

It seems complicated, but remember, whenever you’re following any of my lighting setups, I’m never interested in what’s accurate, I’m only interested in what looks good. Here, none of the lights are set to the ‘accurate’ white balance of the camera and therefore all of the lighting in this shot is either cool or warm in relation to the camera.

Adding Atmosphere

I don't recall taking any images where there wasn’t smoke in the room so I can't show you what it would look like without it, but I do think adding some form of smoke or haze to this setup makes a huge difference.

*I used the handheld SmokeNINJA to add the haze and atmosphere to these images*

I used a SmokeNINJA to add the smoke here as it's a super-quick handheld smoke machine. Adding some form of atmosphere helps to give those bulbs in shot that gorgeous warm glow, plus it helps to force separation between the subject and background too. And by background I mean the bulbs further away compared to the closer ones as well as the actual background. The haze forces us to perceive an extra layer of depth when the bulbs further away appear slightly less distinctly than the ones closer to us. This all helps add depth to the shot

Getting Creative

Lens Filters

With everything finally in place, we can now afford to get a little creative with how we capture the shots. One of my favourite ways to do that is with lens filters. There are a lot to choose from, but here are some images where I was playing with some of my favourite filters.

*Click to enlarge* - Filter Used: **Prism FX Dream Filter**

This is one of the more subtle filters, but it’s very effective when you have lights either in-shot like I have here or at the very least, lighting coming back into the lens. If you look closely, you can see a distinctive glow around the bulbs which is a beautiful effect, albeit simple.

*Click to enlarge* - Filter Used: **Prism FX Flare FX Filter**

This Flare FX filter produces a very dominating effect and it's hard to miss. That said, once again this filter only works when there are points of light in-shot. Without them, you can barely tell it does anything at all. This effect is supposed to replicate the classic anamorphic flares we see in movies. It's very distinctive but it should be used sparingly.

*Click to enlarge* - Filter Used: **Prism FX Chromatic Flare FX Filter**

Lastly, I tried a far warmer version of the anamorphic flares from above and as you can see, it produces a similar effect, just in reddish hues instead of the colder blues. Once again, this only works when there are lights visible in-shot.

Artistic Lenses

As a studio shooter myself, there are limited visible effects when using vintage lenses in my work. Most old or even modern art-lenses display their unique traits and qualities at the edges of their frame and for the most part, the centre of the frame is left fairly untouched by their unique looks. This is great if you shoot a lot of work outdoors with tons of data at the edge of the frame, but in the studio, a lot of that look can be lost entirely when there's nothing but a neutral background at the edges.

With a setup like this hanging bulbs one however, there’s far more going on at the edges of the frame and that results in far more of the individual lens properties shining through. Take a look at some of the ones that I played with below.

*Click to enlarge -* Lens Used: **Petzval 58**

It’s tough to think of a more distinctive lens-look than the Petzval as that incredibly swirly bokeh is legendary at this point. This lens is not easy to use though and not only is it manual focus, but a manual focus that is adjusted via a form of rack & pinion! On top of that, the aperture is adjusted by dropping in metal discs with holes in them via a slot on the top of the lens. User friendly it certainly isn't, but its distinctive look certainly makes up for it.

Another ‘art lens’ I tried was the Lensbaby Velvet 56. This is a far more modern lens and although the effect is less distinctive, a unique look is still very much there. If you’re not sure what you're looking for then I've included a more traditional style image next to it for comparison. The key areas you want to be looking at are how the lens renders edge detail and how it renders points of light. You should see that the Velvet creates those distinctive halos with its bokeh and of course, all the highlights have a very generous glow to them compared to the cleaner Nikon lens shot next to it.

Closing Comments

As I mentioned at the start, this isn’t a particularly tricky setup to get right, it just takes a little more preparation than normal. The only real stumbling block I see many having with this one is the Kelvin shifts and how you may be inclined to go after ‘accurate’ colour. I assure you this isn’t the best approach with this setup and with that in mind, just make sure you’ve selected the manual white balance over auto white balance on your camera.

With this slightly more creative approach to the final image, I’d also urge you to add other elements to the shot too. For example, don’t be afraid to add smoke, lens filters and even art-lenses to the final look and do your best to try and get most of this in-camera over trying to add these effects later on in post. I assure you, it’ll look far better getting it right in-camera first.

Lastly, now that you’ve made your hanging vintage-style bulbs, I’d urge you to test out other bulbs in place of the vintage filament ones. How about coloured bulbs, maybe even more abstract-looking bulbs? Give it a try and let me know how you get on.

EDIT

I received a couple of messages and comments regarding some areas that I didn’t cover (even though I said I would, so I apologise about that).

Shutter Speed 1/50th - One aspect was my use of 1/50th second shutter speed in some of these images. This is purely a subjective choice and there is no technical reason for me to do this beyond a certain look that I’m after. Many modern cameras have provided us with a very clinical and saccharine look to our imagery and although that can be fine in certain situations, the final image can feel a little stark, cold and even lifeless. With this in mind, I will often look for ways to bring a little realism or life back to my shots and whether that’s though my colour balance, lens filters, vintage lenses or even shutter speed, all of these aspects can help make an image feel a little more real by adding these perceived imperfections. Again, please remember that this a personal choice and it does not mean its objectively better. I’d encourage you to play with a lightly slower shutter speed from time to time and see if you like the added movement for yourself.

Using Strobes instead of LEDs - As I mentioned at the top and then failed to follow up on, you can absolutely achieve this look with strobes instead of LEDs, the only problem you’ll encounter is the power of the strobes being extremely bright compared to these 40w hanging bulbs. In my experience, by far and away the best solution to this is to use ND (Neutral Density) gels over your strobes to reduce their output. These gels are simply grey gels that reduced brightness without affecting the colour. These ND gels are very common in TV and cinema so shouldn’t be too tricky to get a hold of either. Applying these gels to your light will reduce them by several stops and they can easily be stacked for even more power reduction.

Products Used

Although I am sharing my own personal thoughts and findings about the lights mentioned in this article, many of you will want to know that I am now a ‘Master of Light’ for Rotolight. As such, I have been given a discount code to share with you when purchasing any of their products via the Rotolight website. Use my code ‘JAKEHICKS10’ when purchasing and you’ll save a bunch of money. I’ve never earned a penny of commission on this though, so if you find a better deal elsewhere, go for it.

Rotolight AEOS 2 PRO

With the AEOS 2 PRO, the world is your studio. Combining the shoot what you see benefits of powerful continuous light with a High Speed RGBWW strobe, AEOS 2 PRO offers unmatched versatility for photographers and filmmakers. Uniquely lightweight with an ultra-thin design, it’s never been easier to achieve beautiful soft light on the move.

AEOS 2 PRO Website Link

Please note that I’ve included affiliate links below for PixaPro and I will benefit (albeit minimally) from the sales of any of these products should you purchase them. To that end, please feel free to use my discount code ‘HICK5-OFF’ at Essential Photo to receive a discount on any purchase via their site.

Godox Spotlight

S-fit spotlight that can be very finely controlled via inbuilt blades or via a range of Gobos. Due to the large lens at the front, this modifier can also produce some of the hardest-looking light available.

Godox Spotlight Link

Godox SZ150R

Essentially this is an LED studio strobe. You can use it with any S-Fit modifiers like beauty dish and softbox you already own, plus you can also change this to any colour and any Kelvin you’d like. It’s only 150 watts though, so you will want to use this in a controlled studio environment.

Godox SZ150R Link

JHP Livestreams…

If you give this setup a go, I’d love to see how the shots turn out, so feel free to share them my way. One way to do that is via my livestream. I livestream every other Tuesday night via YouTube and there I answer your questions, critique your shots, take community images into Photoshop to work on them and discuss all manner of lighting tips and techniques. I look forward to seeing you and your work there real soon. Jake Hicks Photography - YouTube

If you missed a previous stream, the VODs are all saved there too, so check them out!

ONLINE WORKSHOPS - Learn more