STUDIO PHOTOGRAFPHY

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.

To learn about hot lights, read one of the many good books written for cinematographers on the subject. With flashes, 500 watt-seconds is sufficient for digital or 35mm photography of people at full-length. The smaller strobe systems also work for 4x5 view camera 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. "Hot lights" are tungsten or Metal Halide Iodide (HMI) lights that burn continuously. The big advantages of hot lights are

• you can always see what you're going to get, even if you mix with ambient light. You don't need Polaroid tests, fancy meters, and a good imagination.
• you can use hot lights with movie, video, and scanning digital cameras

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.
• tungsten color balance. Kodak makes some nice tungsten color slide film but if you don't like it, you'll have to filter your lights and lens like crazy to use your favorite color films.
• limited accessories. It is much easier to control a light source that isn't hot enough to light paper on fire. You can experiment with electronic flash without burning your house down. With hot lights, you must make sure that your diffusers, soft boxes, umbrellas, etc. can handle the heat.

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. Also, you don't have to waste energy and light filtering to daylight color balance. That said, if you get yourself a 36,000 watt Ultra Dino, you won't exactly be shivering in the studio. The smallest HMI lights seem to be about 200 watts.

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 push the light 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, e.g., the PhotoFlex MultiDome, 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. Note: the M&M image at the upper right was done with a softbox.

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 favorite of mine 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. I usually buy them white on one side, gold on the other.

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. 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

With hot lights, there is no need to worry about triggering the lights; they're on all the time. With 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 someone will trip over one and probably pull something expensive down onto the floor. It is much better to use a wireless trigger of some kind. I have had good luck with the Wein infrared trigger system, which 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. If you want to go fully wireless, you can get a mini Wein trigger that plugs into a flashmeter.

The Gossen Luna-Star F2 is a great example of the modern flash meter. It takes one standard 9V battery that you can buy anywhere. It only has six buttons and their functions are obvious. Without reading the manual, I was able to use all but one of the meter's modes within 60 seconds of putting in the battery. 99% of what you'd need to know from the manual is printed in four sections on the back of the meter. The meter is great for computing lighting ratios. You press the measurement button once to take a snapshot reading. You press and hold it while sweeping the meter around a scene and the Luna-Star F2 draws you a graph at the bottom of the display of the contrast range (e.g., f8-f16). Every time take a flash reading, the meter also shows you the ambient reading with an unobtrusive little bar on the same graph. Unlike the Minolta meters, you don't need a "reflected attachment" and an "incident attachment." The naked meter works to measure reflected light. Add a plastic incident piece and you can measure incident light. Add a little viewfinder and you've got a 5 degree spot meter. It is a great design and smaller than competing products. Nit: It only meters down to EV -2.5. That's a couple of stops less light than most pro SLRs but not as good as some other handheld meters.

The Background

The basic professional background is seamless paper. This comes in rolls 53", 107", and 140" wide. The 53" size is too confining for photographing people, leading to stiff poses and nasty little slipups where a corner of the frame is not covered by the background. On the other hand, the 140" size is not 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 people. A roll costs about $30 and a good starter set would be white, "studio gray", and black. Colored seamless, or as we refer to it here in Cambridge, "seamless of color", tends to give pictures a Sears portrait studio look. Manfrotto makes a nice "Auto Pole" system that lets you mount several rolls of seamless conveniently (a few hundred dollars; can even be motorized).

Camera Support

Obvious Answer #1 to the question of camera support is "Why do we need one? We're using a lightweight single-lens reflex camera and the strobes will freeze any camera shake?" Obvious Answer #2 is "Use a tripod.

Why use camera support? With hot lights, for maximum sharpness you need to ensure that the camera doesn't move during the exposure. With larger heavier cameras, a camera support will allow you to concentrate on composition rather than muscle fatigue. If you're attempting to be creative, a camera support enables discipline around camera position.

A tripod seems like the obvious way to support a camera, but there are much better options in the studio. A tripod is inconvenient. Since using the center column to adjust height reduces stability, 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 so many 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, there is more freedom of design and you'd probably come up with a Studio Stand. This is basically a 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. Arkay, Davis and Sanford, Delta, Foba, and Manfrotto are the most common brands.