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Basic studio lighting setup?

W

whoiswes

Senior member
I'm looking to expand my photography skills into the "studio" area - mainly for taking portraits of my kid/family. For the most part, I'm looking at lighting, and am specifically interested in how those of you with small, in-home studios do your lighting.

Keep in mind - this is as much to play around and have fun as it is to produce good photos. Lighting has never been one of my strong points, and my equipment currently consists of a single SB-600. For the most part I have always shot with available light and in a natural setting (ie, no posed shots, etc) - so posed portraits are pretty much greek to me.

I've got a budget of a few hundred bucks, and was thinking of grabbing a couple of strobes or standard flash heads that I could trigger remotely. I'm not worried about backdrops or any of that right now - I just want to get a better handle on lighting. I'll learn the specifics and technique as I go - I'm just wondering if there's any equipment I should start out with.

I've got a D90 with the kit 18-105, a 35mm f/1.8, and a Bigma - I figure the 35 will suffice for the initial stages of my experiment.

Any suggestions or thoughts?

Thanks in advance for looking.
 
I'd definitely grab a few used SB-24s, SB-28s or the like (any maker, really), a cheap light stand & umbrella kit and some cheap eBay remote flash triggers. Won't cost you more than a few hundred bucks and you can do tons of stuff with the setup.

Just be careful, you'll eventually end up with like 10 flash units like me, haha.
 
You can get started with some household lamps and easy to find materials such as foamboard. No it is not ideally suited for portraits, but as long as you have a decent tripod, you can take product photos that will teach you the basics of ratios, diffusion, reflection, etc. without laying out a lot of cash. Here is an example video that helped get me started several years ago. This guy's channel has a lot of good, basic info about studio lighting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zARqGgHjNc&feature=plcp

I can honestly say that this thread taught me probably 80% of what I know about portrait lighting. I read the whole thing over a couple of days, several years ago:

http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=251549

Follow-up here: http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=273380
 
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Indoor portrait using natural light

1. Outdoor lighting with fill flash. Back light with - 1/2 to -1 fill flash.

2. Outdoor or window light (indoor) with reflector.

3. Indoor, diffuse (soft box effect) with bed sheet or gauze sheet, with reflector.

4. Outdoor or indoor with small gold reflector.

Reflector can be made out of a white piece of construction paper or cardboard. And, can be line with crumple tinfoil with colour gel wrappers.

Snoot effect can be simulate with a round small reflector.
 
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