I have often been asked to take photo's of people by friends and family but have never really felt that comfortable doing it because I didn't have the equipment to take the kind of portrait shots that I wanted to take. Up until now I've always 'just' used either natural light or flash along with a reflector and you can certainly get some fantastic results using just that but I wanted to do a bit more than that so I've built myself a small home studio. Here is how I did it.

The first problem I faced, other than the fact that I had no idea what equipment I should buy, was space or more accurately, my lack of space. Just about everything I had read about setting up a studio said that you needed a lot of space, much more than I had, as plenty of space was needed to be able to position lights both in terms of direction of light and power and also to give the subject and the photographer plenty of space to move about in. So was it possible to build a small studio in your home after all?

My first thoughts where to use my living room which is fairly large but there were two problems with this. In order to get the length I needed it would mean having to hang a backdrop across the archway into our dinning room, the problem here being that light would then shine through even the thickest of backdrop material. The second problem was that it meant taking out all the furniture in the living room each time I wanted to use the studio. Moving the two sofa's wasn't too difficult but the TV seems to weigh more than the average family car and the thought of unplugging all those speakers, DVD players and games consoles each time was unbearable.

The next best option I had was to convert one of our spare bedrooms into a studio but it was hardly a large bedroom in the first place at 3.5m x 5m. As there was no other room I could use I decided to set myself the challenge of fitting an entire studio into a room measuring just 3.5m x 5m.

Before looking at equipment I first had to decide what kind of studio photography I could do in a room that size. I was quite lucky in that I had only really planned on taking portraits of individuals, both adult and children, or groups of no more than 3 or 4 but I didn't just want to have static head and shoulder shots which could easily be taken with someone sat in a chair, instead I also wanted people to be able to lay or sit on the floor and jump about if they wanted. Admittedly there's not really enough space for too many adults to jump around but for children the space was fine. My biggest fear at this stage was that I wouldn't be able to fit someone standing up in the frame if I was only realistically going to be able to stand 3 - 4 meters away from them so the next thing I did was to clear the bedroom and then have my wife stand on one side whilst I used my Sigma 24-70 f/2.8 to see if this was wide enough. I do have the Canon 17-40 f/4 L wide angle lens as well but I really didn't want to use a wide angle lens for portraits as this can distort the features of the face and not give pleasing results. Fortunately the Sigma was just wide enough although I noticed that it would be a bit of a struggle to get more than 4 people in the frame with the camera in landscape orientation without chopping the feet off unless I carefully positioned them. So, although the room was not ideal it was just big enough - now for the equipment.

For lighting I knew that I really wanted a two head set-up as a) this would give me a lot of flexibility b) it wouldn't be too hard to learn how to work with two lights c) I neither had the room or the money for three heads. What I didn't know however was what type, what spec and what make. Working out which type of lighting to get was actually pretty straight forward as I quickly found out that a continuous lighting system was not going to work out for me as, although cheaper than a flash system, they kick out a lot more heat which, in small room, was going to be a big problem and then of course they have more of a problem of colour temperature and maintaining that temperature and of maintaining their power output.

So now I knew what type, but what spec should they have? In doing a lot of reading on the subject I found a lot of comments from people saying that they wouldn't touch a set of lights that were under 500W but apart from the fact that the cheapest set of 500W lights I could find where about double what I could afford to spend I really couldn't see how, in the size room I had, I could possibly need or use one 500W light let alone two of them. I found a range of lower power kits from makes like Elinchrome and Interfit namely the Elinchrome D-Lite 2's and the Interfit EX150 but although the D-Lite's are very well thought of and arguably Elinchrome are a better make than Interfit I had two concerns with both of these kits. Neither kit was particularly powerful at 200W and 150W respectively and as I also wanted the option of taking the lights to other venues, I was concerned that they wouldn't be powerful enough. I was also concerned over the range of accessories for both kits especially the Interfit EX150 which had a very limited range of accessories and was not compatible with the rest of the Interfit range.

I then found the Interfit Stellar 300's which are rated at 300W, have a 150W modelling light, are fan cooled, have a very good variable control and also use the more standard S-type bayonet fitting for accessories making them compatible with a wide range of accessories from Interfit and the likes of Bowens as well. These seemed to fit my needs very well and at under £400 they weren't going to break the bank either. In the end I ordered the Softbox/Umbrella kit which consisted of 2x 300W heads, 1x 60cm (24") softbox, 1x translucent umbrella, 2x medium stands all-in-one carry case and 2x sync leads.

Is it any good?

Yes it is. Obviously at under £400 for two lights plus accessories you are not going to get the same quality as a single Bowens head costing the same but overall I am quite impressed by them. Admittedly the stands aren't exactly the most robust stands I've ever come across but I've had the lights permanently set-up for over a month now and I've not seen the heads droop in any way, it's just that they can sway a little bit and so you really need to put the legs at full splay if you want to use the lights up high. It's not too much of a problem, but it's something to be aware of. The softbox, apart from being a bit of a nightmare to assemble is actually pretty good although I can see that a larger one would have it's benefits but for my intended subjects it is pretty much ideal. The umbrella on the other hand is a bit cheap from the description and images I thought that the umbrella was going to be a silver one but instead I received a white one which you shoot through much like a softbox instead of pointing the head in the opposite direction and bouncing it off the silver side. This actually wasn't too much of a problem as within the confines of a small room where I wouldn't be able to move the lights that far away bounced flash off a silver umbrella may be a bit too harsh especially when used with children. That said I did also buy a Lastolite silver umbrella 'just in case'. My only other criticism of this kit was the quality of the sync cables, although plenty long enough I found, on one of the leads at least, that the connection for the camera quickly worked loose and would just fall out of the camera. The second lead was fine and as you only need to use one lead and I already had plans to buy a wireless trigger I wasn't too bothered about this.

Now that I had the lights I needed to work out how to control them. I asked a number of people who have studio lights about using them with a lightmeter and the general consensus was, with digital at least, you don't have to use a lightmeter as you can just use the histogram on the camera to work out the exposure but it can help especially with balancing multiple lights. Having never worked with lights before I didn't want to take any chances and so bought the Sekonic L-308s. I must admit that I'm very glad I did buy it as it really helped me to understand how to use not only the lights but also how to use my camera manually.

Whilst I was getting used to working with the lights I usually just set my camera to Manual, ISO 100, a shutter speed of 1/250th which is the maximum x-sync speed of my Canon EOS-30D and an aperture of f/11. On my lightmeter I then enter is ISO 100 and the shutter speed of 1/250th and then adjust the power of the lights until the meter gives me a reading of f/11. As the Stellar 300's have 1/10th power adjustments, accurately setting the power is very simple and, according to my lightmeter anyway, the power adjustments are very accurate. In other words if my lightmeter tells me i'm 1/10th under f/11 I just turn the power control on the lights up by one notch and then I'm precisely at f/11.

If I'm working with two lights then more often than not I just have the second light at a much lower power, say around 2 stops lower, than the main light just to lift any shadows so here I might turn the second light off completely and set the first light to f/8, then turn that off and turn the second light on and set that to f/16, obviously the exact setting will depend on the subject, style required, distance of lights from the subject etc. Even though I'm now more experienced of using my lights and pretty much know what power to set the lights at without using a meter I still like to use to check my initial set-up as I find that this is not only a lot quicker but it also stops you from having to fire the flash multiple times into the eyes of your subject before you even take a photo. Once I'm set-up I can then pretty much dispense with using the meter unless I do a significant lighting change.

Next came the backdrop. There is a huge range of different types of backdrops from ones that pop up and stand by themselves to ones that are like giant curtains and require a frame to hold them and the range of colours of the backdrops themselves is staggering. Before I started to look at the backdrops themselves I had to consider the size I needed. For individuals or couples one of the pop up backdrops from the likes of Lastolite, like the one pictured here, seemed ideal but at only 1.8m wide it wasn't suitable for small groups or even people jumping about. Therefore I decided that I would cover one entire wall with a backdrop which meant I needed one at least 3m wide and as I wanted to be able to also take full length shots I wanted one with a train on the floor which meant it needed to be at least 5m long to accommodate the drop. This meant going with the Muslin curtain style backdrops which also meant I needed a support system to hold them. There are many cheap support systems that can hold backdrops of this size but the thing to remember is that that a piece of thick Muslin measuring some 3m x 5m isn't exactly light and so I was concerned that the cheaper systems may not stand up under the weight as I wanted the backdrop to be permanently set-up so in the end I opted for the Lastolite background support system which is very portable, consisting of two lighting stands and a telescopic cross bar, yet very strong. At £130 it's not exactly cheap but there's no doubting it works, however that wasnt the end of the story. After buying the support system I noticed one thing that I hadn't anticipated and that was the legs of the stands. The stands are just normal lighting stands and as such the splay on the legs is quite wide, wider than the normal splay of a tripod, and this meant that the backdrop was actually hanging around 0.5m away from the wall reducing even further the minimal space I had to play with. There had to be a better solution. The solution I came up with was to effectively hang the backdrop like a curtain and to effectively use a curtain pole screwed to the wall however this wasn't ideal. I wanted to have different colour backdrops and the idea of having to take down a curtain pole each time I wanted to change backdrops wasn't very appealing and I also wanted to at least have the option of taking a backdrop with me to other locations. In the end I decided to keep the Lastolite Backdrop System but to cannibalise it a little. I fixed two industrial hooks to my ceiling which were screwed into the joists and then hung the crossbar of the support system from them via some very strong chain. When I want to change backdrops all I have to do is unhook one end and the backdrop slips off, slide the new one on and just hook it back up. As for the two stands, well I now use these as lighting stands and with a Lastolite 1107 reflector bracket I can now use these stands to position reflectors exactly where I want them. For times when I may want to use the entire backdrop support system I also bought a Manfrotto spigot adaptor For £4 that will screw into any standard tripod thus turning my spare tripod into a lighting stand, albeit a rather large and elaborate one. With a couple of 30" reflectors with white and sunfire reflective surfaces that was my studio complete but would it work?

 

The following shots were from the very first shoot I did in my new studio: