New Studio

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you will probably have picked up on the fact that January 2014 marks the start of me having my own studio in Manchester, United Kingdom for my portraiture.

The studio isn't just for myself (I still can't justify that sort of cost). Instead I'm sharing with two other photographers. It is located in a building filled with units occupied by people from all manner of creative fields. Everything from musicians, game designers & fashion designers, to model agencies, photographers & artists.

The studio I'm using is 400 square feet. While this isn't huge, it does have enough space for two shooting areas and a changing room.

One of the first things I did after moving in was to try out the gear in the studio to see how well it all worked, and start putting together lighting diagrams for future shoots. To help with this I was joined on Friday by the excellent young model, Bethany Cammack.

Looking at the block of four pictures above, the bottom right was a standard "Venture" style shot. Octabox camera left, a softbox as a rim to the right, then an additional two lights to blow out the background - with boards used as spill kill.

The bottom left image used the same lights at the same power, except I switched off the two background lights. So (because of the inverse square law) the white background paper dropped to grey.

I turned the background lights back on for the top left shot, but this time I taped red gels over the reflector dishes. I'm still not happy with this as I couldn't get an even cover. of coloured light Without the boards for spill kill, the red light also wrapped around Beth. I'll have to experiment with this to get it to work better.

The top right photo was a different setup. I fitted the monoblock (with a grid on a beauty dish) onto an overhead bracket, then had a circular reflector bounce a little (but not too much) light back. This was against a grey wall. But due to the distance behind Bethany, and that the grid meant no light was hitting the wall, the grey wall fell to black. I then used my Light Blaster to project a pattern onto the wall behind Beth's head - giving the background a little depth. I'll post more about the Light Blaster in a subsequent post, once I've had the opportunity to use it further.