Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Photography: Home Made Studio

There has been alot of DIY things floating around in my head, and as some of you know a while back i showed you how i did some "studio" shots that work really nicely if your into product photography.

Below are some "essentials" that you will kind of need, but that you also probably have laying around in the house.

1. Light

Some sort of light is a big advantage, the more you can move it and twist it the better. But if your planning to combine two different light sources try not to do so, because it will mess with your WB. Remember to preset the WB, which makes life a lot easier in the post process stuff. Light is not necessary but it allows for flexible working hours so to speak.

2. Background

Black and white paper, or sheet or cloth or a t-shirt, anything that is uniform in one of the colors will make great backgrounds. Remember you can also combine colors, just have in mind what "effect" you want to go for. Remember you can also reflect light with the white objects!

3. Camera

The only thing you will mostly working with here is aperture and shutter speed, so its not only DSLRs that you can use this with, also those high end compacts will work for this type of project.

4. Some sort of "tripod"

What i mean here is that you dont need a tripod tripod, one of those things with three legs etc. The whole idea of this is that you want to have the stuff laying around, to take some photos if your bored for example. I have used everything from a cup to books to pillows, to anything that will create a new angle will work. The more things you use as your tripod the messier its going to get, so think about that before your stacking up with 30 books to use.

5. Glass

Glass, might be hard to get, but it was not for me. Glass is great to lay above your background color to create the "reflective" effect, so if you have a picture frame that is a bit on the older side, odds are that the cover is made from glass and you can just remove it from the time being. Thats what i did and it worked great - now handle the glass with care, i dont want to hear stories about you guys cutting yourself, and handle the glass with some sort of protection to keep those finger/fat prints of it!

Thats pretty much it, with some practice you can pretty much have your own studio at home, the bigger the subject the bigger everything needs to go - that pretty much a studio in a nutshell

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice post, I am really thinking of putting some of my spare time into stock/product photography, maybe make some bucks to buy new stuff like filters and so on, it would be nice to have some support from the hobby itself.
The only thing I don't get is the frame (glass) thingie, could you please post a shot made with it, so I can see what kind of effects can you get with it ? Pretty please :)

Alexander Blacker said...

Thanks, its a great way to spend some times, better then watching TV :P

Here is what the effect you will get by using the glass frame :
http://flickr.com/photos/alexanderblacker/2396285655/in/set-72157605198211719/

hope that answers your questions

Cheers

Anonymous said...

not bad, thanks for the example :)

sorry for being this late, my father died and I was in Romania for a bit. How are things for you mate ?

Anonymous said...

hi, nice blog...

just got my new dslr a300 and was googling to find out the trick and tips about using dslr and found your blog. went through all your entries and nice job.

Anonymous said...

Do you have copy writer for so good articles? If so please give me contacts, because this really rocks! :)

Alexander Blacker said...

I written all the articles myself