Portable studio portrait

Those of you who follow me on twitter (you do follow me, don’t you?) may have seen me get a little excited a few weeks ago about the arrival of my portable studio kit.  What I had ordered, and was excited about getting, was a background support stand and a roll of seamless white paper to hang on it, to allow me shoot studio-look hi-key stuff outside the studio.  Today’s image is the first I’ve posted using that setup.

This, as you may recognise, is my wife Aoife, and she was called upon to stand (or rather sit) in for some test shots after I had set up my new studio so that I could play around with different lighting setups and ratios.

Most of the shots were, as they were intended to be, just test shots, and I was trying to see how limiting the fact that the seamless roll I chose is 3/4 width (i.e about 6 feet) instead of the usual 9 foot roll, which just isn’t going to fit in the Suzuki Swift. And what is the point of having a portable studio if you can’t transport it.

In reality the 6 foot width will be limiting, but not overly so, and I hope to make good use of this set up.

Having tried out wide shots, I asked Aoife to pose looking straight ahead and deliberately shot this shot with a tight crop, and only framing for the right hand side of her face.  I’ve seen this look done alot, and I really like the result I’ve achieved here.

The lighting is simple – two lights on the background to ensure it goes totally white, and a third through a shoot through umbrella to soften it, at camera left, about 45 degree angle, and in close.  All triggered using Elinchrom Skyport triggers, and all manually adjusted to get the look I wanted. The trick is to keep the background lights only bright enough that they illuminate the white paper, but not so bright that they cause a loss of contrast in the subject.

I’m very happy with this image which will be added to my portfolio, and I look forward to using the portable studio setup many more times.