portrait lighting
CUSTOMPUBS
I'm a fairly serious photographer who has been taking landscapes , street
photography and natural light shotswith fill-flash for some time. Now,
however, I'm considering setting up a small portrait studio in my house.
I'm at a bit of a loss about finding the best lighting and learning how
to use it. Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks
Darrell A. Larose
what your budget is and what you would like to photograph I could come up
with a few suggestions. If you want to do large format still lifes the
equipment requirements are a bit different than for portraiture. Also I
would suggest studio flash over `hot lights' as things do tend to get a
bit warm in a small studio. I also strongly suggest that you budget for
a flashmeter as part of the studio equipment.
cheers
Darrell A. Larose | ad...@freenet.carleton.ca|dar...@newforce.ca
I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my Grandfather...
...Not screaming in terror like his passengers...
--
Pete Paradiso
This is my first foray into "The Net" and its newsgroups, so bear with
me if I ramble...
Being interested in photography (not necessarily some of the stuff I've
found so far on-line...) for quite sometime, I have gone the route of
flash and ambient light to darkroom to portable lighting systems. As the
other posting mentioned, a great deal depends on your budget.
My budget was (and continues to be) somewhat constrained. I started out
by using photofloods in clip-on reflectors that I bought at a hardware
store. These were an inexpensive way to see if I wanted to spend the
bucks for something decent. Actually, using them on reflective surfaces
actually worked pretty well! I have since gone with portable light
stands, good photographic lamp units and a few unbrellas (reflective and
shoot-through). One thing is a MUST... Buy a decent light meter. It's
much easier than trying to use your camera meter to look at the average
exposures. I was fortunate enough to live in Columbus, Ohio when I caught
this bug and there were (are) a couple of huge stores where you can buy
used equipment. All of this can be lugged around (and stored away in) two
cases.
It's how I started. Good luck!
David Dyer-Bennet
In article <BERGSTRO.9...@franken.src.honeywell.com>,
CUSTOMPUBS <custo...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>I'm a fairly serious photographer who has been taking landscapes , street
>photography and natural light shotswith fill-flash for some time. Now,
>however, I'm considering setting up a small portrait studio in my house.
>I'm at a bit of a loss about finding the best lighting and learning how
>to use it. Any help would be much appreciated.
There is no "best" lighting. Find some good-enough lighting and learn
how to use it.
100-watt bulbs in clamp-on metal reflectors work fine (for B&W, which
is the norm for serious portraits). They don't produce as much light
as quartz-halogen, though. Working the subject, and deciding what you
want to show, are the hard parts. Spend your energy on those. Work
out a few basic lighting setups through trial and error, and use them
over and over and over again.
When you can articulate how your lighting is limiting you, then maybe
you need to improve the equipment. 8 Speedotron Black Line heads,
softbox, snoots, booms, etc. :-) All that stuff is useful, but my
good portraits are from when I did well managing the subject, and the
bad ones are when I failed there. I haven't bothered to invest in the
fancy lighting gear (though I've worked with most of it at one time or
another) because my problems are much more basic a non-technical, so
far.
--
David Dyer-Bennet d...@network.com, d...@terrabit.mn.org, d...@gw.ddb.com
SF cons: http://www.ddb.com/4th-Street, http://www.ddb.com/minicon31
Me: http://www.ddb.com/~ddb (photos, Olympus photo eqpt. for sale, sf)
Chris ROSSEEL
custo...@aol.com (CUSTOMPUBS) wrote:
>I'm a fairly serious photographer who has been taking landscapes , street
>photography and natural light shotswith fill-flash for some time. Now,
>however, I'm considering setting up a small portrait studio in my house.
>I'm at a bit of a loss about finding the best lighting and learning how
>to use it. Any help would be much appreciated.
In that case: just 1 unit (be it halogen, tungten or flashlight....)
and a rather big umbrella (say 90-120 cm in diameter) or a circular
(or qadratic) softbox 1x1 m or 80x120 cm. (try Chimera...)
Furthermore a reflexion shield white or silver (or gold) to highlight
the shadows....
Just visit my homepage (dial 4, 5 or 6) to see some scans I did with
that kind of equipment.
Chris ROSSEEL, 41, photographer
HomePage URL: http://www.club.innet.be/~cfgr/
Lichtaart - Belgium - Europe