A weekly post about lighting on the cheap or DIY (Do it yourself) lighting for anyone who is interested in lighting…

…but doesnt want to drop a few thousand dollars on a nice lighting setup. If you have a nice lighting idea, cheap set up or something home made you would like to share please contact us and we may use it on the site and send you a nice camera “goody.”

This week blog subscriber Eric Lorette sent us a nice (and cheap) way of doing a dynamic lighting shoot in a small place. Thanks Eric!

—-Note from Eric: All photos to follow were taken fast at high ISO and auto WB so they make look bad.

Aside from using my SB-600 (nikon speedlight) off camera with an ebay radio trigger (cheap, fun, and makes a HUGE difference in your pictures when you get your flash off the top of your camera) I have been using some cheap fluorescent light bulbs in dished clamp lights (going to call them DCL’s through out this post)

Bulbs are: N:Vision Energy Saver Daylight. The DCL’s and bulbs were bought at home depot. pictures below.

I used these DCL’s in the “half naked” photo of me, the photo of me holding my dog and also used one of them plus my flash for the funny picture of me where I’m kinda shrugging taken with the wide angle lens. I have made diagrams of the way I set up the lights and took a few photos showing how the lights work.

1:) Half naked photo…

How I did the background:

(2 lights)

Then I added a white sheet in front.

Now if I were to stand in front of that last shot, you would only see a silhouette of me so to add just a hint of light to the left side of my body, I placed another sheet in front of my sb600 and had that fire at 1/8th power.

2:) Dog and I shot…

DCL’s were on both sides of me about 3 feet away on either side, and fash was bounced off a wall behind the camera at 1/4th power or so to fill in shadows on both the dog and me that the light didnt hit. A ring light would have worked perfect for this. I will be making a cheap fluorescent bulb version of one.

When you use fluorescent light bulbs and a flash at the same time, the color temps are different. My bulbs are about 5500k and flashes are between 5500k and 6000k. If you dont use the 5500k bulb you may want to put a green gel over your flash to balance all the lighting.

Using the bulbs I used there was just a very very minor white balance shift needed in Photoshop)

3:) Limes in shot glasses

battlelimeshot

The flash isn’t aimed perfectly as you can tell by the hot spot on the cabinets, but its fairly close to the way i had everything set up. If you look closely you can see a small dry erase white board to the right of the subject (in front of blender) and another piece of paper to the left. I used the white board as a reflector to cast out some of the harsh shadow that appeared on the paper used as the background. the white board wasn’t mounted where it was. I was holding it and moving it all around trying to find a sweet spot. the paper on the other side did the same, just not as harsh. Also the lime shot was during the day so there was some ambient light from window, the photo above was take when it was dark.

shotglass

Thats pretty much it. I hope some of you who have read this, learned something, and will give some of it a shot. If you have any questions or comments please let me post them and I will respond as soon as I can.

Thanks for reading!

Thank you to Eric Lorette (battlestation) you can see more of his work at

www.flickr.com/battlestation
www.ericlorette.com

Apple Online Store