Start a Project to Find What You’re Missing

R2-​DTrooper — © Copy­right 2011 by William Beem

I started a project this week­end to enhance my home stu­dio. My start­ing point was this very use­ful tuto­r­ial on White Seam­less pho­tog­ra­phy by Zack Arias. As I read the tuto­r­ial, it all seems so sim­ple, easy, and straight-​forward. I imag­ine it is, once you’ve been through it a few times and worked through some of the nuances. As you can tell from the shot above, it’s not quite there yet, but I think I’ll get there with time, practice…and more money spent.

My incen­tive for get­ting this to work comes from my new project to show con­cep­tual pho­tos on Wednes­day. Some­times I can go out and find some­thing that com­mu­ni­cates an idea, but other times, I’ll need to cre­ate it. I came up with an idea and had to buy some props, but I also wanted to present it in a sim­ple man­ner. A white seam­less shot seemed appro­pri­ate for it.

Zack’s tuto­r­ial uses three lights — two to light the back­ground and one for the sub­ject. The con­cept is to sep­a­rate the light­ing between back­ground & sub­ject, which gives you a bit more flex­i­bil­ity in cre­at­ing dif­fer­ent looks to present your sub­ject. Since my project is table-​top, I had some options to explore.

I made a trip to Home Depot to get sup­plies men­tioned in the tuto­r­ial. For about a hun­dred bucks, I came home with two bi-​fold doors and a sheet of white tile­board. I had the guy at Home Depot cut it into three 30″ sec­tions, giv­ing me 30×48 boards to use on my table. The oth­ers can be back-​up or per­haps bounce cards for fill if I ever need it.

I have four lights — Two Elinchrom BXRi 500 stu­dio lights, a Nikon SB-​800 & SB-​600 Speed­lights. Since I don’t have three stu­dio lights, I thought I may use one for the main light and put the Speed­lights on either side. One key prob­lem is how to trig­ger them. The Elinchrom lights use Sky­Port radio trans­ceivers and I didn’t have any of those for the Speed­lights. I thought I could put the Speed­lights into Opti­cal Slave mode, but I then dis­cov­ered that the SB-​600 doesn’t sup­port that mode. Have I men­tioned how much I hate the SB-​600? Since this is table-​top pho­tog­ra­phy using 53″ White Seam­less paper, I decided I could use only one of the Elinchrom BXRi 500’s to suf­fi­ciently light the back­ground, and it works.

For now, I only needed one bi-​fold door. It’s still good to have the pair for when I end up with more lights and tran­si­tion to larger projects.

I have a table, but I’m miss­ing sup­ports for the roll of white seam­less. For now, I’m lim­ited to attach­ing the paper directly to my wall with gaffer tape. It’s a bit annoy­ing to do that way, but it holds well once in place and it doesn’t dam­age the paint when I’m ready to take it down. My plan is to get a pair of these Avenger C-​Stands and another pair of Super­Clamps for sup­ports. That leaves me still need­ing a bar to hold the roll of paper, but I can get that on another trip to Home Depot.

I’ve dis­cov­ered that I really do pre­fer the Elinchrom stu­dio lights com­pared to the Nikon Speed­lights. That’s not to say that you can’t get a good pop of power from Speed­lights. My friend John Fran­cis cre­ated a very use­ful blog post com­par­ing the power of his var­i­ous light­ing gear. Did you expect that a Nikon SB-​900 zoomed out to 200 would be as pow­er­ful as an Alien Bees AB800? Maybe some when you con­sider the cost of that SB-​900. In any case, My Elinchrom lights come with built-​in Sky­Port transceivers. I’d also have to buy Pocket Wiz­ards or Radio Pop­pers to reli­ably use the Speed­lights when CLS wasn’t viable, and I like the light mod­i­fiers I have from Elinchrom. It’s just a mat­ter of pref­er­ence and max­i­miz­ing the util­ity of what I’ve already bought.

What this means to me is that I still need to buy more Elinchrom lights. Whether that means get­ting another kit of BXRi 500’s, a pair of Quadra’s or a sin­gle Ranger is a topic for another time, but I need at least three good stu­dio lights to make the expan­sion I have in mind. In other words, another grand or two on light­ing gear.

All of those issues are sur­mount­able, though. I can save money to buy more gear. The real trick is going to be find­ing enough space to setup this envi­ron­ment. Zack men­tions in part of the tuto­r­ial that his sub­ject is about ten feet for­ward from the back­ground. Now con­sider the room you need to com­pose your shot, par­tic­u­larly if you like using longer focal lengths, like a 70-​200mm lens. I don’t have a place in my house with enough run­way space to make that hap­pen. Clearly, I need to buy a big­ger house.

At this point, I’ve deter­mined that my new home stu­dio will cost me about $500K. Pho­tog­ra­phy is expensive.