How to:

This will be more of a discussion than a guide as I am fairly inexperienced in studio photography, but looking for your ideas and thoughts.

For this photo I was lucky enough to get an opportunity to use a local colleges studio for a couple of hours, they had a decent lighting rig set up consisting of a remote slave and three soft boxes. The wall had a large white paper ream spun down and across the floor. I suggest contacting local studios, universities or colleges as students will often be looking for photographers to take photos of them or their work, its a great way to gain experience, use expensive equipment and both parties get what they want for free!

The first challenge is position your lighting; in my case the soft boxes. I placed two of the larger thin boxes down each side and the two square boxes high and in front of the model. The boxes are heavily diffused - giving good all round light, not direct enough to cause harsh shadows which is perfect, I found them much easier to manage than umbrellas. Here is the set up I used:

*lighting positions and general studio set up

The slave is connected to your camera and fires as the main flash triggering the other three soft boxes to fire. The camera needs to be on BULB mode to trigger the external flash. I tried a variety of settings playing with a range of F Stops and exposure times, as well as playing with the white balance.

Eventually I settled on f/14 and a 1/125 sec shutter speed setting the white balance to auto, I purposefully over exposed by two stops as it gave soft edges and a perfect white in the backdrop, although this could have been corrected later using software such as Adobe Lightroom.

Here are a few pointers from my experiences:

• Try to get the perfect white balance and your camera settings sorted first. Playing around with your camera and the lighting while the model is waiting is not ideal. I recommend f/14 and 1/125 sec but play around with these, the white balence and exposure
• Turn off any other light sources; the studio may have standard lighting or a window, try to cover or turn these off as additional light may cast unwanted shadows on the model
• Try as many different poses and positions as your model feels comfortable with. A different or unusual perspective can often create a more appealing image.
• Take a lot of images - they can always be deleted after the shoot…

It would be great to hear other people’s thoughts and suggestions as I am also keen to learn more