Studio Photography

We have recently had a mini studio photography lesson, using linked flashes on the camera and the lighting. Studio settings of cameras were gone over, including specific apertures, shutter speeds and ISO settings for studio photography, and how to find the correct settings.

Studio photography allows the photographer to control almost every aspect of the photo shoot, including props, costumes, light, positioning, poses and effects. Background can be changed either using a green screen, or acrylic backdrops or other materials. Lighting can be altered through different amounts, powers and types of lighting, such as light boxes, ring lights, LED lights, back lights, strobe lights and many more types of light. Reflectors can be used to specifically direct light to certain areas of the shoot, or to remove shadows. Colours of the shoot can easily be changed in many ways. First of all, the director could decide on the colouring through costume, props and background, but also through lighting, or shooting in raw and altering colour in post. Flash photography can also be used to illuminate darker scenes, and to bring out colours that otherwise wouldn't be there.

I would definitely like to experiment with studio photography more in the near future, but here were some of the pictures from our short session. The elements that we mainly focused on was getting the camera to interact with the lighting and the flash lighting that we used. This included using an ISO of 100, as that is a typical studio photography ISO. We also used a shutter speed of 1/125 because this is a good speed for studio photography, to let in the precise amount of light. The aperture we used was around F8, as this has the correct depth of field for low light scenarios, and allowed for the right amount of light to enter the camera. To get the correct F type or aperture, we used a device that the model for the shoot holds, and then presses to get the cameras to flash, and the device records what F type you should be using.