If you are an experienced studio photographer, you already know all of this stuff and you really don’t need to read through any of this 
The key to any artificial light photography is to have control of the quality of light and control the ratio of light [main vs fill vs hairlight]. Studio photography gives you ultimate control of light. A full fledged studio setup can set you back by many hundreds of $, even thousands.
Good news!. If you have an external flash, you can get started with a starter studio setup for under $70. Here is how.
Single flash bounced off into umbrella. Sahana, Oct 2004.
Studio light setup for this shot.
Setting up this light source is very simple. You need the following parts:
- A hotshoe flash like Nikon SB 800.
- A umbrella. You can get either a bounce umbrella or a shoot through umbrella. Check here for instance. I prefer a silver bounce through umbrella. Buy at least a 42″ umbrella and remember that larger the umbrella, softer the light.
- A simple light stand like this. Don’t go crazy over heavy duty etc. This is a light weight setup, just buy a simple lightweight stand. Check ebay, never pay list price on any studio item – I bought my first light stand for $5.
- Lastly, something that binds all of this together, an umbrella bracket with swivel mount.
That’s all. Just put the things together as shown in this photo and you have a functional studio light!. Try it. If you find you are hooked, you can always move on to studio strobes.
Triggering the flash can be done in many ways. Just to list a few:
- If you have a wireless enabled camera and flash, then you could use some form of TTL to trigger this wirelessly. For instance, my D70 will work just fine with the SB 800 in i-ttl mode.
- If this doesn’t work, then use the flash as a dumb optical slave. For instance, SB 800 supports SU-4 mode which is a dumb optical slave. Put the flash in manual mode, adjust the light level by trial and error [if you could buy a light meter, why are you reading this?], switch off i-ttl pre flash [custom menu item something ] and use the popup flash to trigger the light.
- Use a off camera flash cable like the Nikon SC 28. Actually, buy a SC 18 or 19 and save a bunch of money.
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1. Comment by vijayanand
30/Nov/2008 at 9:29 pm
Anand, what might be good is a photograph of the lighting setup that you used for this portrait. i.e. where did you setup the umbrella and where the subject, in this case your daughter was there.
Also, you don’t mention anything about the other lights in our studio (like the light in your room that you have your studio setup) and also the background that you have used. It would be useful for a beginner photographer to get info about these as well.
Vijay