Today is #anythingcanhappenday on the Blog. It’s also International Mountain Day so everyone can embrace the wonder and magic of the mountains around us. There are some truly spectacular mountains all around the world including one—Pikes Peak—that’s not so far from me and that, on a clear day, looks so much closer.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“The light is what guides you home, the warmth is what keeps you there.” – Ellie Rodriguez
Today’s post might be considered to be prequel to my post, Developing a Portrait Style and when you have the time. you might want to read it,
When setting up an in-home studio, the first and most important thing you need is space. You really don’t need that much but more is always better than less.
Caption: The image at right shows the ,lighting setup in my home studio that was used for the featured portrait. It is a screen grab from a “behind the scenes” video I created for my YouTube channel but you can see it because was taken down by them within minutes of being uploaded.
Build-a-Studio, It’s Easier than You think
You can build a studio in a basement, garage, spare bedroom or you can use your living room as Mary and I did when we started our photography business. For each shoot, we would set up the lighting equipment and background, have the shoot and then knock it all down and pack it away afterwards. It wasn’t the most efficient way to operate but it got the work done and it worked. I even won an award for a bridal portrait I shot in that space, so it can work for you too.
In creating a studio from existing space in your home you need to be creative and flexible. My first home studio was in an 8×9-foot space in my former home’s unfinished basement and was sandwiched between my model train layout and an old sofa. The ceiling height in the basement was only 7.5 feet, so my choice of lighting modifiers was often limited to small umbrellas but I was able to successfully use a Plume Wafer softbox as a main light in this space too. I made this portrait in that compact space.that was featured in a previous #corsetmonday post.
My current home studio, where the image at left was made, was a spare room located in a finished basement and measures 11×15-feet. It has a 9.5-foot ceiling giving me more flexibility in my choice of lighting modifiers. I have room to use many different backgrounds too but can just barely shoot full-length shots in this space, so three-quarter lengths shot like this image are part of my standard repertoire..
How I made this portrait: The lighting setup for this portrait of Scarlet Ana consisted of two Paul C Buff DigiBee 800 monolights and one AlienBee B800 monolight. One DigiBee 800 was placed at camera right and was fairly close to Scarlet. It had a 37x27x12-inch Plume Ltd. Wafer soft box attached. An AlienBee 800 with a 16 x 30-inch Westcott Apollo Strip soft box mounted was located at camera left. Another DigiBee DB800 with a Paul C Buff 18-OMNI Reflector attached, softened by a triple-layer Diffusion Sock, was placed at camera left and near the back corner of the studio. The lights were synced with a pair of Pocket Wizard Plus X flash triggers.
The camera used was a Panasonic Lumix GH4 with a Lumix G Vario 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 lens (at 23mm) with an exposure of 1/125 sec at f/11 and ISO 200. The background was a hand painted muslin from Silverlake Photo Accessories. This is a full-frame image of the RAW file captured by the camera. The image file was lightly retouched, color balanced tweaked with PictoColor iCorrect Portrait and layered with the Bi-Color and Glamour Glow filters from Color Efex to produce what you see here.
Shooting in a garage, which I also did in my former home, offers the advantage of high ceiling height providing more flexibility in lighting set-ups but that was not a viable option for me because of the chilly weather here in Colorado. In more temperate climates, this could be an ideal solution, if your cars don’t mind being outside.
Note for my Patreon Subscribers. After looking at all of the images that I made in this series with Scarlet Ana, I realized I could produce a Bonus post in one of my uncensored Password Protected posts using some other images of her. If you are interested in seeing some of the other photographs from this session in that kind of a post, click CONTACT and let me know. If you are not currently a Patreon subscriber—it’s surprisingly inexpensive—details on how to sign up can be found here.