Today’s Post by Joe Farace
I don’t think there is such a thing as being too raunchy when it comes to the art form of burlesque.—Christina Aguilera
A few tips about setting up an in-home studio: If you decide to use a spare room, many homes have white or light colored walls that while aesthetically pleasing can be good or bad depending on how you want to control the lighting.
Brigette Romanek of Romanek Design Studio claims there are more than 900 shades of white alone.” If you have plan to use backdrops, having dedicated supports, like my JTL Background Support System or Savage’s affordable ($144.95) Background Port-A-Stand Kit that includes a roll of 53inch wide White seamless paper, makes setting up faster and easier. If you’re handy with tools Google “build a photo background stand” and you will find a number of DIY solutions.
How I Made this Portrait: I photographed the irrepressible Pam Simpson exhibiting a retro vibe using just a couple of small LED lights using my then-white home studio wall as a background. You can see this extremely simple lighting setup in the thumbnail for this blog post. Being continuous you can see the lighting effect from the LEDs right away and move the lights—which weigh little—exactly where you want them. Camera used was a Panasonic Lumix GH4 with Olympus M.Zuiko 45mm f/1.8 lens. Shutter Priority mode exposure was 1/60 at f/4 and ISO 800, with surprisingly so little grain that I did not need to run my normal Dfine noise reduction software to produce what you see. Image was converted to monochrome with Silver Efex, then enhanced with the Glamour Glow filter that’s part of Color Efex.
On a personal note: After my basement was flooded, Mary and I painted my home studio walls Sherwin Williams Lazy Grey—similar to 18% grey—to minimize unwanted reflected light but before that they were white as seen in today’s featured portrait..
Next to lightstands, something it seems you never have enough of, another thing you need is clamps. These spring heavy-duty steel loaded clamps have vinyl tips to protect whatever you’re clamping and have holes in the handles for hanging clamped objects. They get a grip on your seamless paper to keep it from becoming a runaway and clamps can turn that flat muslin background into draped elegance. You’ll think of other uses. You can buy “official” photo clamps but I get mine from Home Depot and Lowes.
When it comes to portraiture, lighting isn’t only about the quantity of the light produced but is more often about the quality of that light. Why not build your own reflectors and scrims? You can use Scrim Jims, like I do or make your own. The late Dean Collins was a lighting innovator and his Tinker Tubes concept uses PVC pipe to make a framework for reflectors and scrims. If you poke around on the Web and you will find information on this idea as well as other DIY solutions for building reflectors and scrims.
Another item no home studio should be without is pegboard. Over time, you’ll end up accumulating many small items from clamps to speed rings to reflectors to gaffers tape and all kinds of flotsam and jetsam. Hanging them on a piece of pegboard keeps them instantly at hand. And while you may be able to get a good set of hooks from Ace Hardware, I’ve found the selection at the home improvement stores to be small; I get my pegboard hooks from Amazon, of all places.
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My book Joe Farace’s Glamour Photography is full of tips, tools and techniques for glamour and boudoir photography with new copies available from Amazon for $34.95, as I write this. Used copies are starting at the hard-to-beat price price around nine bucks and the Kindle version is $19.99 for those who prefer a digital format.