Studio lighting

[flipper321]

Do any of our resident photography experts have any experience/know how with studio lighting. I'm looking to set up a home studio purely for personal family/baby pics and was looking for some advice.

I've seen the eBay kits and also read the good and bad reviews so thought I'd add another flash to my current speed light and fire these through a couple of umbrellas instead.cheers

Any thoughts on studio backdrops?

Cheers, Flipper

[crashtestmac]

You can go silly with this or just try and stay simple, and cheap.

Elemental and Lencarta make decent entry level kits for hope studio stuff. Or you can get a few YN460 type flashes from eBay for about £35 each and use them.
Do you have a budget...?

If you want to do stuff with backdrops indoors think long and hard. Do you have the room, you need lots of length to take a decent portrait, the longer the lens the better. 85mm is my favorite but if you have a cropped sensor that means you will need to be about 5m away to get anywhere near a full length shot.

So what camera are you using and what do you have to spend.,...?

[flipper321]

Thanks for that note.

Should have given some more info - have a Nikon D7000 (1.5x crop sensor). For portraits I have both the 35mm f/1.8 and the 50mm f/1.8 (52mm and 75mm equivalents).

That kind of distance isn't going to be possible indoors for me. My room length is going to be around 15ft so not sure what options that leaves available to me. Not overly concerned about full-length portraits so hoping that will help.

Hadn't planned on spending loads - was looking at £200 and thats why I was thinking of using the SB-700 plus other flashguns but I guess that the issue I may have is that spending a load of cash out on strobes might be worthless if I haven't got the room to operate in.

[crashtestmac]

Your lenses are Prime so that will help, less distorsion.

You will struggle with full length, if you ask on somewhere like talk photography you will be told about colour temperature and consistency and loads of other shit. I hada full studio setup that i used for a while then i sold it and went to off camera flashes which works well but you are using F4 rather than F8 so you do not burn them out, plus the SB900's over heat all the time.

Look on ebay and get a kit that is second hand rather than a cheap one from China, that said it might last really well...

[flipper321]

crashtestmac - think I'm going to go down the flashgun route too - can I ask which modifiers you use? Umbrellas, softboxes etc and which ones specifically. Am thinking of getting one of those all-in-one reflector/shoot through umbrellas and a softbox but was looking for advice of a good softbox for use with a flashgun as opposed to a monolight.