Follow these guidelines:

1. Your main light should be placed 45 degrees from your subject, and they should be placed approximately 30-45 degrees above, 4-6 feet away. You want to have the light fill in front of the subject and you should try to have it be as level as you can to their eyes. This will be the light that is reflected in the subject’s eyes.
2. The hair light is most often used with barn doors, and is typically behind and above your subject. If your subject has dark hair, the light needs to be placed directly over head. The lighter the hair, the further back you should be.
3. Before shooting the picture, you need to take a light meter reading. Usually the ratio for a portrait is 3:1, however, you can have any ratio that you think is appropriate. 3:1 ratio means that the key light is one and two-thirds f-stop stronger than your fill light.
4. Make sure you have the correct setting by properly metering your lights. Just because you have these lights located correctly, that doesn’t mean that they are going to work correctly. Metering you lights means this – turn off all the lights except your key light. Put the light meter where the focal point is going to be and then fire the strobes. Keep a log of the reading, as well as the other lights. You must do this test on all the other lights too. The only light that is on is the one being tested.
5. In testing this, the key light meter should be 3 f-stops higher than the rest, meaning if your key light gives f7, then your fill light should vary between f3.5 and f4.6. With this test, you can alternate using a tape measure, instead of a meter. The distance will then be measured from the light bulb to the umbrella, and then back to the subject. This needs to total 8 feet. Then you should measure the fill light and make it 3 stops, or feet closer to your subject. You can distance it in the same way. This will give you suitable ratio when shooting portraits – 3:1.