I did some experimenting with basic lighting for portraits over the weekend with my dad. Though we didn’t take a lot of pictures we did figure out it’s possible to get decent lighting for a simple portrait with inexpensive lights (think 100W bulbs). Definitely a lens with a larger aperture (like this one, which I’ve been coveting recently anyway) would make things easier (larger aperture means both better isolation of the subject from the background and a higher shutter speed), but this didn’t come out so bad considering we were just playing around.