Ever thought about setting up your own home studio? In this special buyer's guide long-time studio enthusiast Andrew Fildes does the research for you.
ventually every serious amateur photographer contemplates setting up their own home studio. Although it can all seem rather daunting at first, getting started really isn’t that hard. And once you’re setup, even with a basic home studio, you’ll find there are all sorts of opportunities to create images that simply weren’t possible before.
So, where do you start? Generally speaking, there are four approaches you could take...
Hotshoe flash
The use of normal shoe-mount camera flashes, but set up off camera, can be effective as a basic approach, especially now that you can get simple tilt holders with built-in umbrella mounts to help you diffuse the light. There are also mini light shapers and softboxes that work well as diffusers. (Gary Fong’ s Lightsphere is great for on- and off-camera work.) Most cameras have a wireless capacity now, based on a proper WiFi transmitter or information transmitted optically by the camera’s pop-up flash. Large on-camera flashes like Canon’s 580EX have modes to control multiple flashes and zones. Also the major manufacturers make infra-red transmitters which will control multiple flashes and ratios. That said, the hotshoe flash option is only really cost-effective if you already own a couple of flashes.
As far as power goes, their output is a fraction of professional flash heads. Where they really come into their own is on location, especially anywhere without a power point!
One hint... if you are going to use flashes like weak monoblocs, then any cheap manual flash will do, used with a trigger set and plug-in optical slaves...
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