what type of photography equipment would I need?

Question

I was woundering, what type of equipment would I need for a photography studio?

Answer 1

SLR camera, lighting, backgrounds, chairs, and if you want to print pics there too, obviously a computer and printer.

Answer 2

This is a great question!

Unfortunately it's difficult to answer. This depends greatly on what type of photography you will be doing. If you are serious enough about photography to create your own studio you will do some research. There are a cadre of books on studio lighting and equipment. Before you spend hundreds of dollars on equipment, figure out a budget and what you will really need. Many photographers take years to collect the equipment for a respectable studio. Don't buy junk equipment, just because it's cheap!

That being said, here's a couple of things that might be helpful in your decisions:

Lighting - Other than your camera, this will cause you the most anguish in choosing. It's expensive and difficult to understand sometimes. There are 2 general types of lighting, continuous and flash. Continuous lighting stays on all the time, it tends to heat up a studio, but you can see pretty accurately what your shot will look like. It also will add a color cast to you photography. You can start out by using clamp lights from the hardware store until you can afford something a bit more professional, (a bit of cloth over the front of a clamp light will soften the light).

A flash or strobe, pops when you fire the camera. This style of lighting doesn't heat up your studio as much, and the light it produces, is closer to the color of daylight. You rely on modeling lamps to tell you how your light is effecting the shot, and you need a flash meter to give you the exposure settings for your camera. The output of a strobe or flash is measured in watt/seconds. A 250 w/s flash is 1/4 the strength of a 1000 w/s flash. Most of the photographers that I know, start out with a 500 w/s flash. If you have the money a 1000 w/s flash is more useful, in that it provides more light in larger area, which can be the difference in being able to take a photograph and not.

Don't forget stands and umbrellas for the lights.

Backgrounds-

Be creative. I go to the fabric store and buy very wide muslin or cotton fabric. To make portrait backgrounds I'll get some Rit fabric dye and mix buckets of a couple colors. With an old broom (cleaned), I'll use it like a paint brush on the cotton. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than buying it from the catalogs. Really make sure that you will have enough, you will need more than you think. Black and white are indispensable. Background paper comes on rolls. It's basically really thick butcher block paper. It's nice because when it gets dirty you just cut off a piece, and it comes in loads of colors. You will also need some way to hold up your background. Spring clamps from the hardware store work. You can also buy a background stand, which is basically a couple of really tall tripods with a pole strung between them, very handy, but another expense.

Tripod - This is very simple. Get the best tripod you can buy. I love Manfrotto tripods, but there are others. A tripod is like a horse. It can be your best friend till it dies completely, or it can kick you in the *** when you least expect it. With Manfrotto you can purchase the head different from the legs, take a look at what's available and try a few in the store, make sure you're getting what's best for you, it's worth the bucks.

Light meter- This should be your best friend in the studio. Do your research. Depending on what your needs are, a simple one might suffice. Some light meters only handle continuous light, some only handle flash metering and some do both. Again, this is a case of "you get what you pay for". If need be, you can get buy with just the meter on your camera if you are using continuous light. Otherwise a simple flash meter, could stay in the studio, and use your on camera meter outside.

Well, these are just the very basics. There are so many cool things that you can fill a studio with, but part of the fun of a studio is looking for new toys.

Good luck!

Answer 3

Well you'd first of all need a SLR / DSLR camera.

And about the studio.

You'll need a background. This can be made out of anything, even the plain wall, but with no 90 degree angles where the wall meets the floor, and the floor should be the same colour as the wall. But this is just if you really want to waste your time with hard labour, just to realise the modification in the room.

The best way to reslove this is to buy back-drops; these are made out of poster board, that you find at an art supply store. Or you can even use textile material. I do so. I have a 13 by 7 meter piece of dense cloth, that i hung over 2 walls and the whole floor. Perfect cover and huge shooting space!

Lights. You'll need some fill lights, just to light up your whole studio. I use two 500Watt Fresnel theater lights, and one 300Watt light for local lighting of the subject. To help light dispersion, I've hung a reflector sheet from the ceiling, and can use aditional sythetic foam boards to reflect light. I also have two 85Watt Halogen pannels just for taking out nasty shadows that may appear.

Note that the big theater lights are placed on 2.7meter statives [maximum height of course]. you will sometimes need the lights placed up high. But mostly, I've bought those just because they are very sturdy and reliable.

You'll also need filters for your lights. Different colours, difusing filters, dimming filters etc.

And from this point on, you can just improvise. Bring your props, bring your furniture etc.

I've even bought a small smoke machine that I simply love.

Answer 4

Since you don't mention the type of camera you will be using, hard to give you specifics. There are some cameras that, with an accessory, can wirelessly send to your computer. But those wireless file transmitters can be very pricey. Otherwise, you will have to use the USB cable from the camera to the computer to instantly download while taking pictures. I've done this on a few occasions, and the wire can be a bit of a pain. Or you can have two or more memory cards that you switch out after every session, while one person is downloading the images from the memory card onto the computer, you can still be taking pictures with a different memory card. Depending on how busy you are, you probably want at least one extra person to assist (speaking from experience in doing events like Prom and such)

Answer 5

Darn! fhotoace beat me to the Best Answer. He is 100% correct. With no prior experience you're simply setting yourself up to go into debt and fail miserably. You may as well show up at the Daytona 500 and plan on winning - with no driving experience, no team, no car.

Answer 6

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