Photo Studio, Part 2

Stacy back again to share another Photo Tip.  This week we’ll continue to explore our homemade photo studio. 

Last week we talked about easy backdrops, you can find that post here.  Today we’re going to talk about lighting. 

In my photo of “things I used” you might be surprised to learn that I used my tripod to hold up two sheets of white tagboard to use as reflectors. 

My light source was to my left so I placed the tripod and white reflectors to my right to bounce the light back onto their faces to reduce the shadows.

Here is a photo I took without the reflector, you can really see how half of his face is shadowed.

Here is one with the tagboard reflector.

The thing I like about using the tripod is that it gave me the ability to adjust the height and angle of the white tagboard without tying up my hands.  So even when my kids were standing up, I was able to simply raise the tripod and continue shooting.

I looked at the round professional reflectors and what popped into my head was covering a hula hoop with white or silver fabric J.  Or course it might be just as easy to buy a reflector, some of them are pretty inexpensive. 

What if you don’t have a natural light source near your backdrop?  You could try bringing in a lamp without it’s shade (the shade throws the light up and down rather than right at your subject).  Try a soft white light bulb to give a nice soft light.  If it is too harsh move the lamp farther away and add more reflectors to bounce the light around.

Here's another layout I did with the photos from my homemade photo shoot.  I used Ramona's Beautiful You kit which you can find here.

No matter how you do it, bottom line is that you need to have good lighting to get good portraits.  Have you done anything creative to get good lighting on your subject?