Studio Lighting On a Budget Advice

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is John Budden with Heritage Portrait Studios. What we're going to talk about right now is we're going to talk about studio photography, basically on a shoestring budget. What we're going to do is the goal of any kind of portrait photographer is to build depth in your lighting. And what we're going to use is something that pretty much everybody owns, and we're going to this window lighting. The second thing that we're going to be using, since we're on a...this real tight budget, is we're going to buy foam core. Just white foam core. You can go down to your hobby store or whatever and pick this thing up. It's a great way to reflect light. The goal is, is we're going to build depth in our lighting of our subject. The primary light will be coming from our window, and then what we will be doing is we'll be using this foam core and we'll be positioning it real close to the face or a little bit just out of your scene. And what you're going to do is you're going to have your window light coming in and bathing as your, what we call our key light. And then we're going to have the secondary light reflecting from the window off the foam core and onto your shadow side of your face. The goal here is, is we're trying to build depth into our...into our face. And by doing that -- by using primary light and then just bringing it up here, we're going to be reducing what we call contrast. If you look at my face right now, it's much more dark over here. The closer I bring my foam core to my face, the brighter it gets or less contrast -- more soft-looking. The farther away I bring it, the more contrast or the darker my shadows become. And those are the tips to make studio photography or portrait photography inexpensive at home."