Home Studio Lighting

[gibbstom13]

I'm looking to find an inexpensive solution to make a home lighting set-up to photograph a friend of mine's work for her online shop (she makes dresses/clothing). I tried to do some research online as to what type of lights work best, how to position them, background material, etc. etc. etc., and I'm not coming up with a whole lot of good ideas. Does anyone have any tips they care to share? Can you guy basic "floodlights" from a hardware store and diffuse the light a little bit to make a nice set-up? Any tips would be greatly appreciated.


TG

[Colin Southern]

Hi TG,

You can do it with tungsten work lights, but a better option is probably to just grab a couple of inexpensive studio strobes from Amazon - complete with softboxes) for a couple of hundred. You'll also need a background (probably white seemless paper), and a tripod.

Does this help?

[MiniChris]

Inexpesnive can be a relative term...relative to the size of your pocketbook. I can give you two websites to research: www.bhphotovideo.com and www.freestylephoto.biz these are places I buy a lot of my school supplies from and they are quite efficient and relative to most anywhere else, they are price-minded. Freestyle has a decent 2 strobe setup w.umbrellas for $239.00 US. they sell 16" soft boxes for $62.99 each to help tone down the light strength.

If you want to go non-strobe, you can get a basic three light set/stands (sans bulbs) for $149.

B&H has more stuff than I could list if Ihad ten pages and that much time.

Hope this helps.

[Nomadr]

cant really help with lighting but i think its important to get the wares right, make sure you either have a model or a dummy and make sure the clothes look good on it/her,
have a blank background so there are no distractions, if you can sex it up a bit (depending on where your selling) so much the better,
that may have sounded odd but i remember seeing something on ebay years ago where two dresses were modeled, the plain one got 120 views whilst the one showing a bit of pants got over 6000 views, i guess there is some truth in the saying that sex sells,
on the home lighting i would say its best to use natural ligjht when you can, you can use a couple of bedside lamps shining down to light the subjects , just make sure you get the white balance right for the colours, you dont want someone ordering mauve and getting pink,(prolly a good idea to include a disclaimer about colours may not match what your computer screen see's),
only jesting but a few ideas to be going on with, cheers martyn