Steve — © Copy­right 2012 by William Beem

Stu­dio Light­ing Setup Prac­tice Sessions

I spent a fair part of yes­ter­day in my liv­ing room doing some stu­dio light­ing prac­tice for a shoot com­ing up this week­end. My friend Steve (above) and I hired a model and rented some stu­dio time. For him, it’s a chance to enjoy his hobby. For me, it’s work for a future project. We have four hours to get in, get our shots, and get out. Basi­cally, I want to make sure that I’m pre­pared to get every­thing on my shot list. If I’m ready, then it shouldn’t be a prob­lem. If not, then it’s amaz­ing how quickly you can piss away four hours tweak­ing a stu­dio light­ing setup.

Before the Stu­dio Session

Call me para­noid. I try to imag­ine every­thing that can go wrong. You can’t fix some­thing if you don’t know its bro­ken. When I first vis­ited this stu­dio, it was brand new and a friend was going to shoot a pair of mod­els. Steve and I vis­ited just to check the place out. It seemed very basic, but it’s a large space for us to work. As we dis­cussed it out­side, we noticed every­one was com­ing out. It seems the power was off. Not because of an out­age, but because some­one for­got to pay the elec­tric­ity bill. It was an over­sight, but it ruined the pho­to­shoot. You can bet that I asked if the power bill was paid up when I booked my ses­sion. I also wanted to know what resources they had. Things like back­drops, steplad­ders, power cords, light­ing stands, fur­ni­ture and props.

I’ll use what they have, but now I also have a list of things that I may want to get before my stu­dio ses­sion. For instance, I want to use some V-​Flats and the stu­dio doesn’t have them. For­tu­nately, a friend of mine is a VP at a large graph­ics shop in town. He tells me they buy Gator­board by the pal­let and asked me to call him tomor­row. One more thing off my list.

Pre-​Visualistion Helps Stu­dio Light­ing Setup

By pre-​visualisation, I mean that I know what shots I want. Some bright, some dark. I know how I want the model to pose and what I want her to wear. To help her know what I have in mind, I found sim­i­lar shots and shared them with her. She already let me know that she has the wardrobe I need, plus some other things. I never want to rule out spon­tane­ity. Just the same, I also don’t want to rely upon it too much. It’s like the old SCUBA mantra, “You plan your dive and dive your plan.” When I walk into that stu­dio, I have an agenda and I want to be pre­pared for it. That’s the Boy Scout in me.

I’m glad that I put my stu­dio light­ing setup to the test yes­ter­day, too. My gear con­sists of three Elinchrom BXRi 500 lights and a plethora of light mod­i­fiers. I tried each of the lights and the mod­i­fiers. Some­thing quirky was hap­pen­ing, though. Some of my Elinchrom lights weren’t fir­ing all the time. They’d fail to go off, but then I heard the beep as if it just recy­cled. It was very puz­zling to me.

I stopped to inves­ti­gate the prob­lem and found some com­ments that it was as sim­ple as a bat­tery prob­lem in the Sky­port trans­mit­ter. OK, I’ve had it a few years and never had to replace it. This must be how you know it’s going dead, right? Know­ing it would hap­pen, I had a replace­ment bat­tery in my cam­era bag. It turns out that the bat­tery wasn’t dead. It’s just that it wasn’t securely seated in the SkyPort.

This may seem like a sim­ple prob­lem, but it wasn’t obvi­ous to me when it hap­pened. Now that I know, it’ll be an easy thing to check if it hap­pens in the stu­dio. If I hadn’t checked my gear to make sure every­thing was work­ing, I’d be screwed try­ing to cover things with a sin­gle SB-​900 flash as my backup. That’s not the expe­ri­ence I wanted. So a lit­tle stu­dio light­ing setup prac­tice just saved me a mas­sive panic attack this weekend.

Expos­ing Myself

I have a pretty good idea what stu­dio light­ing setup I want and the expo­sure val­ues I need on my cam­era to get my shots. After all, I can see the expo­sure val­ues in my pre­vi­ous pho­tographs. The shot of Steve up there was one of our test shots last year when we were work­ing out some­thing on a pre­vi­ous pho­to­shoot. F/​16, ISO 200 and ¹⁄₁₆₀^th shut­ter speed in front of a black wall using my Elinchrom Deep Octa. The only thing I don’t have doc­u­mented is the power of the light. Since I always start at the low­est power and increase, it’s not hard to get that one value set cor­rectly for this kind of light falloff shot. Of course, try the same thing on some white walls and it’s an entirely dif­fer­ent ballgame.

Since I didn’t have a test sub­ject around, I setup my cam­era on a tri­pod with a timed release and went through all of the shots. I wanted to remind myself about the dif­fer­ences where I placed the light. Do I need to feather the light on this type of shot, or get it full blast? What ratio do I need between my key light and my rim light? You’d think I’d write this down at some point, but I pre­fer using some stu­dio light­ing setup prac­tice before a shoot. If I wait until I get there and refer to notes, then I may for­get some of the nuances. For folks who do this every day, it’s always fresh in their mind. Since my stu­dio expe­ri­ences are a bit far­ther apart, it makes sense to have some stu­dio light­ing setup practice.