Studio Work

Recently, I was asked why I didn't do more studio portrait work.  After all, there's a lot of money that can be made doing that!  But my response was that it takes more space, time and effort than I can often give right now.  Even a simple two umbrella, backlight, and hairlight setup requires a lot of work to set up correctly.

I initially set up for a 17 person session with a black backdrop and a gelled backlight, but  found out the night before that several of the people planned to wear dark colors.  So I switched to a white seemless paper backdrop instead.  While it doesn't look very wide here, the backdrops are 10 ft wide.  They still weren't wide enough for that many people and so it needed to be "extended" via Photoshop.  Individual photos of the people were also taken and I used a smaller 5 ft wide black velveteen backdrop with a gelled backlight for those images.

All of my living room furniture needs to be moved away for photo sessions.  Basically, the entire house is turned upside down to do a session.  Washrooms are turned into dressing rooms, the family room becomes a staging area... it's too much to ask to do it more than perhaps a couple of times per year.  Still, my family has put up with it when needed.  (The second photo shows what the room looks like with furniture still in the way, but with the softboxes used for main and fill lights.)

Umbrellas were used for the group images, but later I switched to softboxes for the individual photos  I have a little more control of the lighting with softboxes, but umbrellas spread the light wider which is good for high-key photos (white backgrounds.)  Ideally, I would have lighted the backdrop with two umbrellas and then used two more ro light the people.  But there just wasn't enough room to do that.  Years ago when we lived in the San Diego area, I had used my three car garage as a studio.  It had plenty of room to shoot out of.  All I had to do was pull the cars out.  The garage was fully finished, so it had walls, not like some garages where you can still see the 2x4 wood supports.

One day I'd like to have some real shooting space where I can leave all my gear set up.  Then perhaps I can do more portrait work or commercial photography work.  One day...

Be sure to click on each image to take a closer look.