Feeling in the dark about portrait lighting? Whether it's a flashgun or a softbox, off-camera lighting has confounded many aspiring portrait photographers.

But your portrait photography doesn't need to suffer because of this. Portrait lighting need not be so complicated. Whether you're in a professional studio or shooting a model in your home photo studio (see our 10 tips for setting up your home photo studio), often the simplest portrait lighting set-ups yield the most classic and dramatic effects.

By experimenting with different poses you can see what works and get new portrait ideas to apply to your next shoot.

To help you along we've put together our latest photography cheat sheet, a visual guide taking you through several simple portrait lighting set-ups, and showing the different effects they create.

Our cheat sheet shows you how to use different kinds of off-camera lighting, from soft boxes to reflectors, and at the end we suggest a few striking poses to use with these portrait lighting effects (you might also like our portrait photography cropping guide to use when editing your portraits).

Feel free to drag and drop our infographic on to your desktop and save it for a handy reference the next time you have someone in your home photo studio.

Finally, if you like this infographic, you might also like our free family portrait photography cheat sheet, as well as our free posing guide with 54 cool portrait ideas.