Double Duty Studio Lighting For the Cheapskate
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.
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January 13th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Great I was exactly thinking about using one of these for my home studio , but my concern is wouldnt a 60Hz AC cycle ruin my timing … how do you cater that ?
January 13th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Guru,
I’ve never seen a problem with any electrical timing. Go for it!
April 2nd, 2009 at 6:22 pm
I’m planning on doing a DIY studio set up in my friend’s basement because we wanna do a “photo shoot” with our group of friends,there’s about 16 of us. We wanna do a group portrait thing and I was looking around for ideas in terms of lighting…
I have a couple of friends that own these work lights similar to what you have posted above, I was just wondering… would I set that up the same way as normal studio lighting? Like one to act as the key light, one as a fill and another as a back light?
Also, since the lights are yellow for the work lights, would it be a bad idea to use a Speedlite 580 while I use the work lights as “studio lights”? Since the on-camera flash fires as white while the work lights are yellow. If that’s the case, would I be better off taking photos without the flash, and just relying on the work lights set up like studio lights? Or would it be okay to mix both the flash and the work lights (while I have already adjusted the white balance to incandescent).
Thanks.
April 3rd, 2009 at 11:21 am
CanonNewbie,
Yes, you’d use these light just like you would a flash. Place them the same. However, if you want to knock down the power output of one (say as a fill), you’ll have to use something to reduce the light output, or move the light back (hard in a basement). For example, you could place a sheet in front of it (careful, they get hot).
As for combining work light and flash, the only way you’ll get the colors to match is to gel your flash with a CTO (color temp orange) gel. If you don’t have that, then you’ll just have to skip the flash or arrange the lights in such a way that you can mix color temperatures and still make a good shot. If you don’t have a CTO, you could put something else colorful over the flash and use it for the background or something. Then use the incandescent WB on your camera so that the work lights make white light and the flash makes some other color. Could look cool.
Good luck, and let us know what you come up with!