Camera Dojo

The home studio has been making amazing progress lately and we did some major work on it today to get it ready for it’s first test shoot. The final width comes in at twelve feet and the shooting area is fifteen feet from the main shooting wall. The back wall was painted with gloss white for high key background that will mostly be used during product shots. For other types of shots a background support is in place with a ten foot wide white seamless paper roll on it.

Was it as simple as cleaning out the garage and painting the walls? Absolutely not, continue reading to see what else we did to put some finishing touches on the studio.

As you can see from the shot here (of David from Esquire Photography), notice the rafters of the garage have been covered with white paper. This was actually done with spare rolls of paper from a print shop. The paper acts as a big reflector adding at least a stop of light onto the scene. You can see this effect by noticing the gradient getting lighter as it goes closer to the subject. Without covering the rafters, if you tried to bounce flash in the area you would end up with an orange color cast from the light bouncing off the bare wood. Adding the paper strips provides more light and eliminates any unwanted color casts. You can still see a few spots that have to be cleaned up but the area is now better than 95% completed.

While David is an ok subject for a quick test shot, let’s face it, what’s better than a cute girl on a motorcycle? The main lights are the Westcott TD5 Spiderlites while a little extra pop was wanted so an on-camera 580 EX flash was bounced into the ceiling. We wheeled David’s Ducati into the garage and asked Taylor Thorne to do a few quick poses for us.

It only took a few test shots to get the light and camera settings dialed in nicely and the pictures we were getting showed us that the home studio setup is going to work perfectly. I didn’t take much time trying different lenses as we were just checking light balances and I couldn’t be happier with the results. One of the things I plan on adding is a dedicated station for a laptop for tethered shooting with Breeze Systems DSLR Remote Pro.

What’s left? The following is a list of the remaining items that will totally finish off the studio completly:

• A few more strips of paper towards the back of the room
• Taping up all the seams for a cleaner look
• An overhead two bulb flouresenct fixture with daylight balanced bulbs (hair light and background light)
• White muslin drape to seperate shooting area from the rest of the garage area

We hope you have enjoyed following how we have built our home studio. Now we can get back to writing some more articles. If you have a home studio or want to ask any questions about ours, please come to our Flickr group to discuss it.

If you are into Do-It-yourswelf projects, be sure and visit our friends over at DIYPhotography.net.

Author: Kerry Garrison