Photography help needed! Home based studio, how do I set up lighting?
blow the heck out of the background- fill it with light and use a reflector for the flash- if you can’t afford a light stand/ umbrella set up, you can spray paint the inside of a plain umbrella with white and silver, and fudge it a bit… but you would be best to go on a USED photo equipment site for cheap deals… good luck!
The halogen worklights will only give you enough light for the subject. You can do post work like in Lightroom and adjust the WB of the background. Or you can invest in a small flash setup… the cheapo sets on ebay work great for this. They are also great for learning how to use studio light setups.
If you are shooting clothing photographs, you need to take a good look at how the clothing is being lit in some of the clothing websites and then emulate them. It is VERY difficult to shoot clothing if it is not actually hanging on a model for various reasons, but mainly because the potential buyer cannot see how it drapes the model. If this clothing is something you are making, you need to up your advertising budget and buy some lights and invest in some model time with a good MUA and wardrobe person. If your are shooting this for a client, your billing should cover the cost of the equipment you need to shoot the shots. My guess is you have a decent camera, but have never shot in a studio environment or even attempted to emulate lighting during your time learning how to be a photographer. As you are finding out, it is all about the control of your lighting and pretty much that comes from working as an assistant to a photographer who runs a studio, not here. I took three classes in lig
Those lights you are using isn’t going to help you very much. It is not the king of light that makes studio photography work well. First, in order to get rid of shadows, you need to diffuse the light. With proper studio equipment, you would typically use flash umbrellas to diffuse the light. I can’t imagine what you would do with 500W lights – they would melt most materials you can use for bouncing the light. As for the white / grey background, it is grey because it is underexposed. The lights illuminating the object / foreground is not sufficient for the job – you need to have a light on the background as well to illuminate it to the point that it is overexposed.
