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Setting Up A Studio
Why go into the studio? Studio photography is easy because you can get exactly what you want. Studio photography is hard because you can get exactly what you want. Soft light, hard light, hair light, background. Everything is under your control. If you are a tremendously creative person who knows how to use studio equipment, you'll get wonderful results. If you are less creative, you'll have very flat and boring results. If anything is wrong with the lighting balance or exposure, you'll have nobody to blame but yourself. Rent or buy? Most big cities have good rental studios that come complete with lights, backgrounds, and often assistants. This is the way to go if you have a big budget and know exactly when you want to shoot. Having your own studio is great for spontaneous work and also because you can 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 floor-based one but makes the studio a much nicer place to work in. Also, you'll still need at least some of the floor-based stuff for location work. A Bogen rail system cost about $1200 and really makes studio photography much more enjoyable. 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. Some of the more popular rail systems are, the Bogen system (extensive brochure available from them), the FOBA system (imported by SinarBron), and the Calumet system (1-800-CALUMET). 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 take your subject out into the open. "Daylight" is a combination of sunlight (around 5500K) and skylight (approx. 9500K), averaging to around 6500K in the summer. Clouds or shade push the color temperature much bluer, up towards 9000K, though an overall overcast is usually 6000K.] Hot Lights Once you know how much light you need,
decide whether to go hot or cold. * You can always see what you're
going to get, even if you mix with ambient light. You don't need
Polaroid tests or fancy meters. Not too many still photographers use hot lights, though, because they have the following disadvantages: * Heat. Thousands of watts of
heat that make the photographer sweat, the models sweat, and the
props melt. HMI lights are mercury medium-arc iodide
lights that burn at a color temperature of between 5600K and
6000K. They produce about 4X the light of a tungsten bulb with
the same wattage because less energy is wasted as heat. Cold Lights "Cold lights" are electronic
flashes, much more powerful than the ones on your camera but
basically the same idea. Monolights and powerpack/head systems. The business end of both is the same, a flash tube surrounding an incandescent bulb. The incandescent bulb, usually around 100 watts, is the "modeling light," used by the photographer to judge lighting effects and ratios. These aren't very effective if the ambient light in the studio, e.g., from windows, is high. Most photographers burn a few Polaroids to make sure that the lights are properly set. A monolight has a wall outlet on one end, a flash tube on the other, and a big block of capacitors in between. These are nice for location work because you don't have a lot of cables running around. Using several monolights together isn't as much of a problem as you'd think because (1) good monolights have a 4 or 5 f-stop output adjustment control, and (2) most monolights have a built-in slave so that when one fires, they will all fire. In a powerpack/head system, you have one big heavy capacitor-filled power pack and a bunch of relatively lightweight heads connected by high-voltage cables to the powerpack. You can adjust the lighting power among the heads and also the overall light output. These are the most flexible and most commonly used studio flash systems. Flash power is specified in watt-seconds (joules), and is usually abbreviated as "w/s". Choosing a brand of studio strobes is a similar process to choosing an SLR camera system. If you buy the wrong brand, you may have to scrap your entire investment as your ambitions grow. If you want to do it right the first time, no doubt you will be very happy with Speedotron Black Line, Norman, Dyna-Lite, Comet or Sun Star Strobo systems. These allow you to pump 1000 to 3000 w/s into a single head, adjust over a 5 or 6 f-stop range, have more powerful modeling lights, and are more reliable in heavy use. Many of these systems offer interesting zoom heads that allow adjustment of the light cone angle. Note for high speed photography: Studio flash systems generally take between 1/200th and 1/1500th of a second to dump out their light. This is fast enough to freeze much motion but won't stop a bullet or give you a perfectly sharp splash. Studio strobes are designed for relatively long illumination times because color film actually suffers some reciprocity failure at the very short exposure times of on-camera flashes that aren't working hard. In other words, Kodak and Fuji don't guarantee that you'll get correct color balance at 1/50,000 of a second because the red, green, and blue layers of the film respond differently to being illuminated for so short a time. If you want to do high-speed photography, your options are (1) use an on-camera flash set for 1/32nd power, or (2) get a studio strobe system specifically designed for stop-motion capability. Kapture Group sells equipment for high-speed photography. Light Control Whatever lighting system you get, make sure that it is reasonably popular. Otherwise, you won't be able to get any accessories to fit. You need to be able to control whether the light is hard or soft. Hard light is generated by a small and/or far-away light and results in strong shadows. Examples of hard lights are the sun (not small but quite far away) and bare bulbs. Soft light is generated by a large diffuse light and results in shadow-free images because there are many paths from the light source to the object. Examples of soft light are an overcast sky, a north-facing window close to the subject, a bulb reflected off an umbrella placed close to the subject. Another dimension to control is diffuse/specular. A diffuse source contains light on many different angles whereas specular light is organized in parallel rays. Specular light doesn't bounce around the studio filling in shadows and lowering contrast, spilling onto the background, etc. Old-time photographers relied on silver umbrellas to get a somewhat softer light source. With white translucent umbrellas, you can use them like a silver umbrella and bounce off them (losing about 1/2 the light, which will go through and away from your subject) or shoot through them, which results in slightly harder light with the same 1-stop loss. However you use an umbrella, you'll generally get a diffuse light source. The modern religion is the softbox, a reflector-lined cavity covered with a white diffusion fabric. The best of these are the PhotoFlex MultiDome or the Chimera system allow you to remove the front fabric to get a "sort of hard" light, to place or remove an interior baffle to get a "slightly less soft" light, and to warm up the color of the light with a gold reflector. Because softboxes surround the light head, you lose much less light than you would using white umbrellas. Some photographers put a big grid over the softbox to create a large specular source. Louvers create the same effect but only on one axis. An inexpensive honeycomb grid will turn a strobe head into a specular light source, albeit not a very large one. Photographers who use these tend to use many, "painting a scene" precisely with pools of light. Strobe head grids are $50-75 each or sold in sets with different light angles for about $200. Snoots sit over a light head and turn it into a very small light source. These are usually used for hair lights. You can stick a small honeycomb grid over the snoot to tighten up the cone of light thrown by the snoot and also make the light more specular. Barn Doors are black metal flaps that sit around a strobe head and keep the light from going where you don't want it to go. This is Hollywood technology from the 1920's. If you really want to control the angle of the light cone thrown by your head, you should probably get a zoom head or a bunch of grids. Reflectors are really too general purpose to be called "studio equipment" but they are essential studio items and, if cleverly used, can eliminate the need for additional strobe heads. A popular reflector is the PhotoFlex Litepanel, which is a huge sheet of gold/silver reflector, white diffusion fabric, or black light absorber in a plastic frame. You can light through this and turn it into a huge softbox, bounce off of it to bring the contrast ratio closer to that magic Kodak 3:1, or take it outside and have an assistant hold it to filter the sun. Another essential item is the disk reflector (e.g., Photoflex Lightdisc) which stores compactly but springs open to a large round reflector with a steel frame. The most important word in studio light control is gobo. Hardly anyone knows what it means, but you can't beat the mysterious sound. It actually is short for "go between" and refers to anything that you stick in between the light and the subject to cast a shadow, diffuse the light, or whatever. More: see the Photoflex Web site for a wide range of standard professional products and/or the Calumet catalog. If you really want to understand the art of lighting, read books written for film makers and also look at old black & white movies (before they had color, they used lots of interesting gobos to add shadow patterns on white walls and other boring surfaces). Flash Triggering If you have hot lights, you don't have to worry about this; they're on all the time. If you have strobes, the camera has to tell the strobes when to fire. This is traditionally done with a sync cord. Sync cords come in many lengths and are available coiled or uncoiled. The one thing in common that they all share is that they suck and you will trip over them and probably break something very expensive. It is much better to use a wireless trigger of some kind. Most wireless systems consists of a small on-camera hotshoe-connected flash with a filter over the front that only passes IR light. The other half of the kit plugs into your strobe powerpack and waits for the IR pulse from the on-camera unit, then triggers the flash. There are various radio slaves (e.g., Quantum) that also perform this function, possibly better in a large studio or outdoors. Flash Metering Unless you have a very unusual camera (e.g., certain Rolleis and Contaxes), you will not be able to meter flash exposure with a through-the-lens in-camera meter. Virtually every professional carries a handheld flashmeter. This is a $500 device that measures ambient light, light ratios, how many pops of a studio strobe system you'll need to shoot at f/64 with your view camera. Almost everyone uses a flash meter in incident mode. You stick a white diffusion dome over the meter and hold the meter in front of the subject's face, with the dome pointing back at the camera. Then you push a button on the meter and it triggers the flash (assuming you have it connected via a sync cord or Wein system). The meter then reports the appropriate f-stop to use. This gives you a reading that is independent of the subject's reflectance. In other words, if the subject is white the meter doesn't get fooled into thinking that it is a brighter light and if the subject is black the meter doesn't recommend opening up two more f-stops until the subject is rendered as though it were 18% gray. The Background The basic professional background is seamless paper. Seamless paper comes in rolls of 53", 107", and 140" wide. The 53" size is too confining. On the other hand, the 140" size is not really necessary most of the time, which is why it is only available in a handful of colors. The 107" width is about 9 feet and that's a good size for most uses. A roll costs about $30-$40 and you should have white, "studio gray", and black for starters. For location work, Photek's Background-in-a-Bag system is kind of nice. These are big sheets of what looks like crushed velvet that you just duct tape up against a wall. They cost about $130 and fit into a included gym-bag. Calumet makes a really slick "Tote-a-Round Muslin" system that leans up against any wall and gives you that classic studio muslin look. They are around $300 each. Camera Support This is where most readers would say "duh, use a tripod. First of all, if you're doing 35mm or medium format work with strobes, you don't need a camera support because the flash freezes motion. But if you're using hot lights or big cameras or doing something creative, you probably need some kind of camera support. A tripod is in fact usually the wrong tool for the job. A tripod is inconvenient. Since using the center column to adjust height is the sure mark of a fool, you have to adjust all three legs to raise or lower the camera. You can't usually get really low or really high or really hanging out over your subject with a tripod because the legs get in the way. Part of the reasons that tripods have such shortcomings is that they are engineered to weigh less than 250 lbs. If you want the most stable support for a fixed weight, a tripod is the right design. Once you accept the idea that a camera support can weigh more than the photographer, then there is more freedom of design and you'd probably come up with a Studio Stand. This is basically a very heavy rigid single column off which you hang crossbar arms off of which you hang tripod heads off of which you hang cameras. There are wheels on the bottom that you can lock. The columns come between 6 and 12 feet in height and prices range from $350 to $3500 depending upon features and stability. Courtesy of Philip Greenspun, Photo Net |
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