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Studio Photography
take some of your equipment on location.
Ceiling or floor?
Decide whether you want your studio to be floor-based or ceiling-based. A
floor-based studio means that you have lightstands for the lights and
background supports for the background. All of these supports are very
lightweight because they are designed to be portable. You'll be treading very
carefully and/or you'll be knocking things over.
In a ceiling-based studio, you mount background rollers on the ceiling and a
rail system that allow flexible positioning of lights anywhere within a
rectangular area. A ceiling-based studio costs about $1000 more than a floorbased
one but is a much nicer place to work in my opinion (remember that I'm
6' tall, 200 lbs, and move with the grace of... an MIT student). Also, you'll still
need at least some of the floor-based stuff for location work.
I personally bought a Bogen rail system for my house when I had to give up my 3000 sq. ft. studio in
Cambridge. It cost about $1200 and really made studio photography much more enjoyable for me. The
coolest part of any rail system is the pantograph light support. These pull down from the ceiling and are
cleverly counterbalanced so that they just stay wherever you leave them. You just grab a light and move
it up or down an inch and it stays there. Pure mechanical design magic. As far as I know, the Bogen
system (extensive brochure available from them), a FOBA system (imported by SinarBron), and the
Calumet system (1-800-CALUMET) are the only rail systems available in the US.
The Lights
Decide what format camera you'll be using. Bigger cameras require smaller apertures to get adequate
depth of field and hence more light. Decide how big your subjects are going to be. Head-and-shoulders
portraits require much less light than automobiles.
I don't have enough experience with hot lights to tell you how much light you need, but there are many
good books for cinematographers on the subject. With flashes, 500 watt-seconds is sufficient for 35mm
photography of people at full-length or 4x5 photography of tabletop subjects. Most serious studio
photographers start with about 2000 watts-seconds, which is adequate for 4x5 photography of large
subjects, and will rent another pack if they have to light something huge.
Sunlight
If you have any windows in your studio, you might be able to use the sunlight coming in. The color
temperature of sunlight varies from about 2000K at sunrise to 4300K in the early morning to 5800K at
high noon in midsummer. [Note: the sun streaming into a window is different from what you get if you
http://www.photo.net/studio/primer (2 of 17)7/3/2005 2:18:01 AM