photography

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Studio work

Why a studio?

You can shoot outside and inside. Outside you have to deal with the sun, clouds and other such lighting conditions with which you have to work. In a studio, you have more control over the lighting. This helps to create the photographs you want, if you concentrate on the subjects and don't mind the lack of nature backgrounds. You can always add a background later, but that is more difficult to do and quickly looks unnatural.

My home studio with reflector, softbox en Profilux 400 W/s strobes.

Backgrounds

In a studio you'll want a background. Paper is a good material that doesn't reflect much light (to avoid flash reflections) but you can also use velvet for example, which looks nice.

As for color, it's good to have at least neutral colors, like black, gray and white. White is used for high-key photographs, black is useful for low-key photography but my favorite is gray, which is often still quite dark (or can be made darker in post-processing) but still gives room for black & white tones.

Lighting

To control lighting you'll probably want to get strobes. These external flash strobes allow for a lot of light so your photographs will be crisp & sharp. You can also use powerful lights, but those generate a lot of heat (bad for you and the model) plus they cost more electricity.

Lighting techniques

Setting up lighting is something you will gain experience with by doing it a lot. However, there are ofcourse some basic techniques. An excellent introduction on techniques like broad, short, butterfly and Rembrandt lighting is here.

Extras

Next to strobes, one of the first useful extra items is the reflector. This, as the name suggest, reflects light so you can make shadow areas a little less hard. In the photograph above you can see a reflector lying on the floor.

Props

Props can be very helpful in creating a variety of images. Check your surroundings and see if you have useful things nearby such as hats, flowers, chairs and such. These objects also allow your model to feel more relaxed, since it's more difficult to pose just out of the blue.

(c) 2006-2011 Dolphinity B.V. / Ruud van Gaal