Use Your Home as a Photo Studio

How About Using Your Home as a Photo Studio, you can use any place in you home and turn it into a "Studio Home", a Photo Studio to shoot portraits, a model or the kids...

Consider these advantages in, Setting up a home studio - Studio Lighting - Really cheap homemade diy studio - no special lighting needed, sounds interesting then read on!

The idea of this is not new and I have been actively suggesting this for years, but the other day the idea came home to me more vividly as we had decided to change the old sofas for new. That's when it hit me one more time, without the furniture in the living room the place started to take on the look of a Photo studio.

Of course I could have easily moved the old furniture to use my living room as a studio more often and in fact in the past I have often done so, but the old furniture was so heavy.

We had the old furniture taken away the evening before the next day delivery and as fate would have it, of course the new furniture didn't arrive the next morning... some delay with the shipping... So for a number of days I had the perfect Home Studio to work in, much to the annoyance of my Wife who had to watch TV sitting on the floor and also put up with my Studio Flash Equipment and stands in the corner of the room.

While were talking about a Home Studio lets see what you need to set one up and get started:

Studio Flash Equipment:

The first thing you must have is a small studio flash unit fitted with an Umbrella or Soft Box attachment, which will attach to your separate studio flash.

This separate flash doesn't have to be so powerful and you could possibly obtain a second hand unit quite cheaply at your pro photo store. Have another look at this previous article.

As you are using your living room as your studio, it's quite possible that there may be large windows letting in a fair amount of light and all you have to do is balance the existing daylight with your flash set-up

This is very easy to do if you are the owner of a Digital camera, as you can check the results on the LCD screen on the back of the camera. The beauty if this is that the camera will balance the two light sauces and all you have to do is to run some tests before your photo-shoot to get it right.

The best camera choice would be a digital SLR camera, such as the Canon EOS digital Rebel XTi or the EOS 400D digital. However any of the new digital point and shoot cameras can be used with surprisingly good results.

Use a tripod with your camera, especially if you are balancing two light sources and where your shutter speed may be slower because you are working indoors using flash and part daylight or other light source. If your stuck for posing ideas for your model check this out and never be stusk for a posing idea again.

Use large pieces of white card, (art board), as reflectors or even large pieces of white polystyrene, usually obtained at a builders merchants.

If you have a secondary studio flash, you could bounce this into the reflector to fill in the shadow. This creates a very soft fill in and is how most pro photographers would set up when shooting in a pro fashion studio.

You can also bounce your secondary flash off the ceiling and sometimes this can work quite well, especially as most rooms in your home might be quite small. Avoid working in a room that has strong wall colours, as this will reflect the color into the skin tones of your model and look unnatural.

Now don't stop there because anywhere around the home can be the perfect studio background, for example I used the corner of my kitchen, away from the kitchen units of course and yet another good background was put to good use.

When setting up a corner of you home as a Studio, try to use some of the existing items around the home, at the same time keeping it simple with plain background, such as a plain painted walls, as I said before avoiding strong coloured walls as they may reflect in images and cause strange colour to your subjects skin.

When choosing a background in you home studio, you could use a wall that has a nice painting hung on it. Best choice here is that it's a large painting and bright or light, an abstract painting for example could look great.

Some Home Studio Photographers, go the extra mile and use a large room or a garage, setting up material background drapes to actually try to copy a full pro fashion studio, that might be using large rolls of background paper or special drapes for their background effects.

This is all very noble, but unless you happen to live in an exceptionally large home, filling you living room with such background materials, may misfire because of the cramped space available, therefore I always suggest you USE your home much "as is", of course after clearing up old shoes, dirty washing and empty candy wrappers, beer cans etc. lying around on the floor!

Take yourself out in the garden and if you have some nice flower beds or plants, there you go for another background. The Deck or pool in the back yard of you house can make a great little studio area.

If however your garden looks like a land fill site as my garden use to do and your fresh out of ideas in you home, then take yourself and your set of "little models", (the kids), to your favourite location or the beach. A great day out for them and you could just end up with a set of great images.

If your working outside always use flash-fill with a ratio of 2-1, and make sure that your shooting at the correct time of day on location that is, 2 or 3 hours after Sunrise, or 2 or 3 hours before Sunset, that's when the light is soft and warm in color. Check out the previous pages for more info on these two points mentioned here.

Let me know how you get on, post a comment in our forum.

More about the Image on the left: As I said above, try to use your Home Studio, "As Is", and don't try to overdo it by adding to much light.

I was asked how I shot this image and to be honest with you it was quite simple. I resisted the temptation to flood the area with an Umbrella flash as this would have spoilt the effect I was after.

Here are the Camera, flash and existing ambient light details: Camera, Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT1, ISO setting 100, Exposure 1/15 second at aperture 5.6, separate Metz 45 CL-4 hammer-head Flash bounced off the ceiling. Ambient light, Daylight through two small windows, tungsten ceiling light and fluorescent ceiling light. Camera was set on a tripod because of the slow shutter speed.

To further enhance the result, the Image was edited in Adobe PhotoShop, using the sharpen filter and then adding the unsharp mask, the image size was reduced to 72 dpi

If this was shot using a film camera, there would be limitations to a Adobe PhotoShop edit, as the grain from the film would have prevented me in getting this result.

So to recap and simplify the details: The Image was shot with a Digital SLR camera with the existing lighting, allowing the shutter speed enough time to capture the ambient lighting, assisted by a small bounce flash off the calling. The Image was edited in Adobe PhotoShop, using the sharpening filter and also the unsharp mask filter. By using these two filters it helped to enhance the very softly lit image.