How To Set Up Photo Studio Lighting

How to prepare up your own photo studio

Why waste your precious time on concrete photography when you lot tin can practice and then much in Photoshop? Well, because experimenting with physical tools – lights, gels, diffusers, backdrops and reflectors – can create crisp effects that are very hard to faux well digitally. Professional commercial photography combines concrete and digital elements. It'due south frequently quicker and more intuitive to fix up a scene physically, instead of trying to false information technology in Photoshop – and it's easier to tidy upwards a scene in Photoshop if you offset with a make clean, well-lit source image.

The first question to inquire is whether you lot desire to concentrate on people or objects. Portraits and product shots crave different skills and styles. If you concentrate on one or the other, you might need to select different equipment.

The secret of good product shots is even lighting and accented cleanliness. Look at whatsoever professional magazine or catalogue shoot and you'll immediately see that it's spotless. There is no dust, no blemishes, no fingerprints or imperfections. You can simulated that look in Photoshop with methodical cloning and spot healing, but it's faster to kickoff with an object that's physically uncontaminated. Simple and cheap cleaning tools – small paintbrushes, air blower aerosols, and a disposable fabric – aren't glamorous but are essential.

The other key element with photography is even lighting. Products are oftentimes shot 'on white' with a clean, white background and no hard shadows. On-camera wink is useless for this look, because it creates as well much front-back contrast and excessively sharp shadows.

A simple and very cheap trick is to cut off a couple of sides around a cardboard box, leaving a floor and sides. Line the walls with photocopier newspaper, and light them with nigh any convenient light sources. For a horizon-costless curved backdrop, tape some A3 or A4 to the superlative of the box and bend it under the object on the flooring. With careful placing you can bounce the lights off the paper to create a smooth look.

For a more professional approach, apply a light tent: a handbag or box fabricated of white material that helps diffuse calorie-free around an object, giving a smooth and sophisticated even glow. Light tents usually have a hole in one side for shooting, while the other sides act equally a diffuser. Prices get-go from effectually £25, and y'all can discover many examples online. The more sophisticated models include single-colour detachable backdrops for a wider range of effects.

Portrait and larger-scene photos are more than challenging, and you lot need more equipment to exercise them well. Where products need fifty-fifty lighting, model portraits are more varied, and smoothen lighting is merely ane of many possible starting points. For maximum flexibility y'all need at least ii independent light sources. Professional studio lights – from £200 upwardly – simulate daylight. They also come up with several attachments including umbrellas – the light bounces backwards off the inside – and soft boxes, which are behemothic diffusers.

Signal source lighting on-camera flash is almost useless for portraits, so don't retrieve of diffusers and reflectors every bit extras. It's difficult to get adept results without them merely, if you're on a budget, you lot can fake similar results with a good handheld flash on a cable that tin can exist pointed away from a model to bounce light off walls, the ceiling or the floor. You lot can as well use a handheld reflector to control flash bounciness in a more deliberate and intense way, although you may need an assistant to help, and you'll almost certainly need to experiment to get a good consequence. Subtle side- or uplighting is often used to make models look more glamorous and stylised.

What to go for and what you should pay

The camera

Yous'll become flossy-smooth results with a mid or high-end SLR, but almost whatsoever photographic camera that costs £350 or more is fine for photo studio piece of work, as long as you can run images through a noise reduction filter in Photoshop, such every bit

Racket Ninja

The lights

Professional person photo studio lights cost from £200 and are daylight-balanced for clean output. For a cheap alternative, attempt a couple of builder's lights from any DIY shop for around £10 each, and fix the residuum in Photoshop. You could besides catch ane of the all-time band lights, many of which are highly affordable now.

The fix

Backdrops can be apparently white, textured or coloured. For avant-garde effects you can also use reflectors to focus light or color on a specific spot. Backdrops come on rolls, and a rack of rolls is a standard feature in professional studios. For a cheaper result when shooting modest objects, y'all can use white, coloured or textured paper.

Vivid studio lights tin be hot and distracting, then professionals often employ loftier-powered studio flash instead. Combined with diffusers and reflectors, studio flash is a professional solution and costs accordingly. Expect to pay around £400 for a reasonable entry-level package, and then more if you want advanced extras, such as lite, audio or even WiFi-controlled triggers. Check out an equipment manufacturer like Calumet Photographic for a full range of professional person photo kit.

With large units, portability and motion become an consequence. Static studio lights and studio flash need to be positioned advisedly, both vertically and horizontally, for maximum creative potential. Yous tin also set up two or more calorie-free units to produce different levels of light output for deliberate control of calorie-free and shade. Most lights include bones stands, simply professional studios use a track and pulley organisation that makes information technology possible to place the light where you need it. Y'all probably won't demand to invest in the total system unless you spend about of your fourth dimension doing photography. Merely it'southward useful to know that it'south a possibility, and also to know how to employ it if you book someone else's professional studio for a shoot.

For close-ups, a useful extra is a ring flash, which fits around your camera's lens and produces smooth only vivid face-on lighting. Ring flash isn't inexpensive – prices start around £200 – and y'all demand to discover a model that fits the lens on your compact or SLR. But if you find yourself being commissioned to practise a lot of work that needs head and shoulder or full-confront shots, information technology should before long pay for itself. And the departure in quality is unmistakable.

The bottom line with creative photography is that while pro-level kit is expensive but powerful, you tin accept a lot of fun and produce some impressive results with much cheaper kit. Apply some imagination and inventiveness to your projects, and there are nigh no limits on what you can achieve.