Studio Shooting with Limited Space

One of the challenges you might face while working on your shooting assignments for AI is needing to shoot in an indoor “studio” environment and if you are like I was during school, I had a house full of people, so I had limited space for my shooting.

There are ways to overcome this obstacle, if you have kids that are in school, shoot your assignments in the living room while they are in school during the day, or use a portion of your basement or attic. At the time I was attending classes, I had 6 people living in my home in Georgia and it was cramped even with 1,800 sq ft and 4 bedrooms and a large living room and dining room. I would sometimes shoot late at night while everyone was sleep, but sometimes I had to shoot during the day and if I could not use one of the rooms in the house, I would use the garage.

Simulated outdoor shot using my garage

For one of my classes, we had to simulate an outdoor shoot in soil, but shoot it indoors. This is something you will frequently have to do in many types of photography. It might be a situation where the client needs this shoot done on a deadline and the weather is bad, or for other reasons. For this assignment, we needed to replicate the same amount of light outdoors with our studio lights. I chose to use some small toy dinosaurs as the characters for the shoot and shot them in some of the soil from my flowerbed in front of my house.

Studio set up for this shoot

Now I am not saying these are 100% perfect, but I did get an ‘A’ on the assignment and I think I did a pretty good job considering it was my first attempt. One of the things you will find as you pursue a career in photography is often you have to adapt to overcome situations. One of my favorite photographers, Chase Jarvis is like the king of overcoming obstacles for photography. He shoots a lot of sports action photography and has designed and built many of the customer rigs and mounts that he uses for commercial shoots.

If you have limited space using a small portion of a room for your studio for class assignment, then don’t use your light stands, rig up your lights on the top of a door or curtain rod if you have strong ones. If you still don’t have enough room, try using Speedlights instead. A Canon or Nikon Speedlight on a small stand takes up a lot less space than the full size studio strobes but still give you tons of light power.


Comments/Questions

Fill Flash

    Fill flash is using your flash to fill in darker parts of your image already lit by other light. I like to use it for all my people photos outdoors as it makes for better, stronger images.

    Adding fill flash to your images is easy, just turn on your camera’s flash and automatically get the results shown here. You don’t need to fiddle with any settings; just press the Flash (bolt) icon button and your camera does all the rest of the work, no camera pops up the flash by itself, so you have to turn it on by yourself and the camera does the rest.

    When shooting outdoors, fill-flash lights up people’s faces so they aren’t drowned in shadows and also puts highlights in their eyes so they look alive. Additionally, fill-flash lightens shadows and adds details to darker areas, while preserving the highlights. When shooting in direct sunlight, fill flash helps to make your images better, especially when the subject is back lit.

                                                            No Fill

    Using an external Speedlight is better than using the pop up flash built into your camera, mostly because the add-on flash has more power, which means greater distance and more fill light for your images. I recommend the 430 EXII if you are a Canon user and the SB-400 if you are shooting Nikon as these are two of the best units for fill-flash and these units are less expensive than the SB-500 or 580EX II which generally run around $500-$600.

                                                          Fill-Flash

    Fill-flash also helps with making your colors render more vivid and natural. When shooting with the flash alone I often feel that the shots seem to have a blue tone to them, which is why I use either a slight orange gel or an orange flash diffuser to make the light warmer and the colors stand out better. To have more or less fill flash, use the +/- to increase or decrease the power output of the flash and alter the overall light, which in turn changes the way the image looks.

    One last thing to remember is when using fill flash, make sure you take your ISO off auto, especially if using the pop up flash as the camera will set the ISO to the lowest setting, which means if you are shooting indoors, it will be too low.
Comments/Questions