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Do you live in a house? How about an apartment? As long as you don’t live in a cardboard box then odds are good that you have some kind of auxiliary lighting sitting around your home. Many people have those super high powered halogen work lights at home like the one pictured at left.

If you have some of this lighting and you’ve been wanting to get a studio going at home but don’t want to spend the money, you’re in luck. This is a great way to get started for no extra cost.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when using this kind of lighting:

• They get hot! The surface of these lights can be several hundred degrees. Be careful with children around and keep any large dogs that could knock the lights over locked up. Also keep anything flammable away from the light heads.
• Use a white sheet for softer lighting. Hang a big white sheet up between the subjects and the lights to create a giant softbox to soften the light. The further you move the light from the sheet, the softer the light will be.
• Use “incandescent” white balance. Using auto white balance on your camera could give you odd color casts in your photos. Setting the WB to incandescent will take away the yellow color quality and balance the light to make it look more natural.
• Use the laws of light to your advantage. With a little know-how about how light works, you can use multiple lights of the same power output and get different light levels on your subject. You can have one light as the main light, and another of the same power as a fill light. Changing the distance will give different lighting ratios. Check out The Laws of Light for an explanation on this.
• Remove the guard. Many lights come with a guard over the front to protect the bulb and to protect you from the heat. But they give out a grid patterned shadow.

With a setup like this and a little creativity, you can get fantastic photographs in your home. You can setup these lights just like strobes for the best lighting schemes. To learn more about this, check out Portrait Lighting For Beginners.