Studio Gear

The studio has become a bit of a passion recently but I never seem to have enough equipment for the shots I want to replicate from other blogs and magazines. My two Bowens lights have been really good but I’ve had to supplement them with another borrowed pair and really three lights are a minimum for the sort of high or low key shots I want to take.

To that end I’ve been scouring ebay and similar sites for second hand equipment. Nothing has really come along until about two weeks ago when I spotted a post on the used equipment forum on the Bowens site. I contacted the seller who agreed to split the bundle he had for sale and to cut a long story short I picked up a Bowens Esprit Gemini 750 kit last weekend.

These supplement my 400’s really nicely, especially with the Lastolite Hi-Lite I’ve been using for my high key shots. I picked the lights up Saturday morning and had them up and running on Saturday afternoon taking shots of my work colleagues (someone’s leaving present). All seemed to go well on the day, the shots on the camera screen looked good but then despair when I checked them later on the computer, every shot had a horrible yellow cast. Eventually this was quite easily rectified, all to do with my white balance set up which I’d set to flash. Apparently flash heads have a tendency to yellow over time although taking a custom white setting sorts this. Taking the WB down to 4850 in lightroom cleared everything up.

Lesson learnt I had the lights out again Sunday afternoon for some baby shots in my small home studio. I’ve never really been that happy with my previous attempts with the high key stuff but after researching on the net and trying various settings with a stand in doll I finally came away with some shots I was really happy with.

For me the Lastolite works best one and a half stops brighter than my key light and I set the background to f13. My key light was set to F8 but I then opened the camera up to F7.1. Whether that’s a quirk of the camera or something else I don’t know but the settings worked well and gave me the skin tones I’d been looking for. Nice white card and careful placement of the key light gave me the crisp white fore grounds I’d been looking for and altogether I had very little to do in Light room as regards post processing.

I suppose that’s the advantage of having a set studio and hopefully I should be able to replicate this set up on Friday when I have my first commercial shoot.