Building a portrait studio...

Ya, this reaffirms my cammera is horriable in anything but daylight it seems.. (well horriable for this type of stuff). but the pose was good, this was me testing out butteryfly lighting. I don't think I got it right :) and I have yet to get a light diffuser.

Well picked up some hot lights today...they are 500watts each, thats two 500watts I have. (they can go on 250watt). I must say, 500watts is not as bright as I thought. In either case, the studio has: back ground, area, and lighting. So technically its complete.

Well the first shot, using a point and shoot dig with the attached flash (hence the unflattering light). I will post later how my muslin is supported... and just a general view of it. I need tripod, camera, strobes, lenses' still.

So I went to hastings yesterday and picked up a studio lighting book. It had a lot of things I hadn't even begun to think bout. The one question I really was getting bugged with is "WYSIWYG" ligthing. Since I would be using flash units, how do I set up the lighting if the lighting isn't applied until the instant I take the picture? Turns out the flash units (like the ones I want) come with a "modeling lamp" which is a lightbulb that is on and gives you an idea of how the light will be (although these us tungstun bulbs as far as I can tell, where as the actual flashes are balanced for daylight). In either case, this is exciting news and makes the idea of setting up studio lighting a whole lot easier to handle.

The nifty thing is I have a slight edge when it comes to setting up lighting and am not coming in "cold turkey". I have for many years used and played with a 3d modeling package called Truespace on the computer. The nifty thing bout that is you can set up lights etc in a 3d scene and then render it, since its raytraced rendering the lighting is quite accurate, so through using this program for other projects in the past I got a feel for setting light schemes up, after all it really is all about the lighting.

I just wonder now if in a 4 light set up if its all strobes:
Key Light
Fill light
hair light
background light.

Are these all strobes (flash) ? I am assuming the same lights I want I can control the flash intensity too, to make softer lights etc, and I am also assuming that some of these flashes allows me to add color gels to it to change the light (say for different background colors).

Oh well, just figured id toss this out there.

I am doing this exact set up almost, except for dowels im using a tension cable from IKEA. (its nifty)

Well its all painted, just need the tension cable going up tomorrow, and then buy the muslin next week. Thats where this project ends till I get a camera, strobes and a tripod.

Well the studio is almost done, just a final coat of paint (doing that now) a vaccuming, and hanging the cable. By tonight it will be as done as it will get until I find the money for the two strobe lights and the camera (plus some lenses probably), but thats in the details.

Here we go, the floorplan to my sun room. This shows my thinking of how to set up my studio. The width is getting tight supposedly (although sears portrait studio is not even close to 10ft wide, its like 5-6ft wide. So I am not sure what a real width for a studio should be...

Rest of the details on the image.

Here is day two, got a bunch of garbage boxes out, picked up in general. Got a lot more pickingup to do, and still gotta paint. Then thats done. Still trying to determine the rigging to use for backgrounds. But I think I am going to string this tension cable across (its from Ikea).

So I have decided to convert the extra room in our house into a sun room. The image here is the before shot before this is done. This will be a long process, as it takes money (that I really don't have), but I wanted to document it start to finish. Not including paint, and other materials I have I expect this process to end up costing $1800. That price includes modest beginner lighting, background materials, and the camera itself. I have no way of really financing this, yet, but I will continue to document this process so that others may learn from my mistakes if they too want to build their own studio in their house.

So, make sure your trays are stowed and your seat is in its upright position...

(p.s. I don't expect this site to be updated to often, as this is going to be a slow and expensive process, though feel free to add the RSS feed so you can see when updates are here.)