Bill Pierce
Well-known
I got a question about setting up a formal portrait studio. Any empty space from a room with the furniture moved to one side or the garage with the car parked in the driveway can be a portrait studio. What makes it a portrait studio is a background. That can be anything from a roll of seamless paper to the professionally painted canvas backgrounds of different sizes from folks like Savage and Westcott. I use to go to the hardware store and buy canvas drop clothes and paint them myself. I’m still using ones that were painted 35 years ago. I even painted backgrounds on rolls of seamless, but those didn’t make it into old age.
You can use any camera. I’ve shot studio portraits with a range of cameras from 35mm cameras and their digital equivalents to 8x10 view cameras.
What you do need is lights. Window light is good, but always changing, sort of like those good friends that are wonderful but unreliable. Big studio strobes are overkill with today’s small cameras, especially if you want a portrait of a single person that has shallow depth of field. (That said, I have a 3200 ws Broncolor that belonged to Richard Avedon that is great not only for shooting large format film, but doesn’t even strain to provide the small f/stops that group portraits demand.) But what gets used the most in my studio is continuous light, an affordable quartz light bounced into a big umbrella. Ross Lowel was a cinematographer who designed a number of small, versatile quartz units for location work. I’ve talked to DP’s who have said their location trucks are still the same size, but the lights in them are now much smaller. One or two Lowel Totalights into a large inexpensive umbrella (You’re not taking it on location and testing its durability.) is going to provide a lot of light. It’s a broad, soft like that you see in much Irving Penn’s work, and it’s positioning is much less critical that a smaller source with sharp shadow edges. As you work in a studio more, you may turn to a smaller key light and add background, fill and hair lights that marked the work of exceptional photographers like George Hurrell who was the absolute master of the Hollywood portrait. But one large source, a big umbrella or a light bounced of any large, light colored surface, can let you concentrate on and deal with the subject, which, after all, is the important thing in portraiture.
I hope that’s an answer to the question. Added contributions from other folks who shoot studio portraits much appreciated. Further questions from those who didn’t realize the photographic potential of their garage always welcome.
You can use any camera. I’ve shot studio portraits with a range of cameras from 35mm cameras and their digital equivalents to 8x10 view cameras.
What you do need is lights. Window light is good, but always changing, sort of like those good friends that are wonderful but unreliable. Big studio strobes are overkill with today’s small cameras, especially if you want a portrait of a single person that has shallow depth of field. (That said, I have a 3200 ws Broncolor that belonged to Richard Avedon that is great not only for shooting large format film, but doesn’t even strain to provide the small f/stops that group portraits demand.) But what gets used the most in my studio is continuous light, an affordable quartz light bounced into a big umbrella. Ross Lowel was a cinematographer who designed a number of small, versatile quartz units for location work. I’ve talked to DP’s who have said their location trucks are still the same size, but the lights in them are now much smaller. One or two Lowel Totalights into a large inexpensive umbrella (You’re not taking it on location and testing its durability.) is going to provide a lot of light. It’s a broad, soft like that you see in much Irving Penn’s work, and it’s positioning is much less critical that a smaller source with sharp shadow edges. As you work in a studio more, you may turn to a smaller key light and add background, fill and hair lights that marked the work of exceptional photographers like George Hurrell who was the absolute master of the Hollywood portrait. But one large source, a big umbrella or a light bounced of any large, light colored surface, can let you concentrate on and deal with the subject, which, after all, is the important thing in portraiture.
I hope that’s an answer to the question. Added contributions from other folks who shoot studio portraits much appreciated. Further questions from those who didn’t realize the photographic potential of their garage always welcome.
