Watch the video: Make a DIY Peanut Home Photo Studio
With a cost-of-living crisis, spiraling inflation, staggering gasoline prices, and an unprecedented decline in living standards, for many of us, spending money on a photography set or a trip to a professional photography studio isn’t a priority at the moment. But there are ways to create great selfies without the hefty costs.
In this project, we set ourselves a challenge: to create high-quality portraits in the studio on a budget of just $90 / £75, which was basically enough to buy two cheap handguns and a backsplash.
We supplemented this with a few items found around the house—an old garden bag, broken awning, trash can liners, and kitchen paper—to build our own home photo studio.
studio light switch (Opens in a new tab) It expands and softens the light source so that it is pleasant and pleasant. This usually requires photometric modifiers (Opens in a new tab) Like soft parasols and parasols, but can be expensive – large softboxes and parasols can be pricey. So, if you want to save a little money but still get quality lighting, why not make your own? In addition to our DIY modifiers, we also chose a green screen studio setup.
green screen (Opens in a new tab) It might seem like a luxury for our small studio, but chroma-key paper costs less than $8 / £5 on eBay and its versatility means we won’t need to buy a lot of other color backgrounds. Alternatively, using a simple digital trick, we can turn green into any color, or drop in an entirely new background.
Check out the best lens for selfies (Opens in a new tab) If you are not sure what you want to shoot, besides the best selfie camera (Opens in a new tab) If you want to upgrade your equipment.
1. Make a speed light stand
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We wrap a small piece of cardboard around the end of the speed lamp, leaving a load. We glue them in place, then cut out each bend and spread the sides. Next, we take a larger sheet of cardboard, make a hole for our speed-light tube and stick it on the sheet.
2. Prepare the bag
We used an old garden bag for our softbox. We make a slit in the bottom center to feed our speed light tube through, and then we mount the carton board to the base of the bag. For further reinforcement, we run some thick wire around the edge of the bag.
3. Line with foil
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Cover the sides and base of the bag with tin foil. Next, we take a white polythene bag (we used a roll of pedal litter liners) and cut a piece to fit the bag. We roll it halfway to make a first layer of spreading, before a second layer of polythene is glued to the front.
4. Attach the stand
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Attachments can be tricky. We used the plastic stand for the speed lamp. This has a thread on the bottom that can be attached to a tripod board. We screwed the stand onto a cardboard tube to the back of the speed lamp, so we could mount our DIY softbox to a tripod.
5. Umbrella Cover
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Our parasol canopy is made using an old golf umbrella, tin foil and polythene bags. The inside of the canopy is covered with kitchen paper to make it reflective, and trash liners are taped over the opening to distribute the light. The speed light attaches to the canopy stem and tilts upward to bounce off the foil.
6. Hang the umbrella
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Whether made from tin foil and an old canopy or from the real thing, a parabolic umbrella provides a beautiful wide illumination that is soft but direct. As such, it is the perfect modifier to be placed over a subject for top-to-bottom illumination. It is released less strongly than the main light, fills in the shadows and creates a pleasant light on the hair.
7. Just fill in the light
The fill light should produce a poorly exposed subject. We leave our softbox closed and only release the top canopy. With exposure settings locked (manual mode, 1/200 sec, f/5.6, ISO100), we adjust flash power until it produces a nice fill like this.
8. Light switch only
Next we turn off the fill light and turn on the main light (the soft box of our DIY garden bag) and point it towards the face. We want this light to give us a properly exposed subject, so we manually adjust the flash power until it looks right, at 1/4 the power here.
9. Switch and fill light together
Finally, we power both the fast speed units and fire them together for a balanced switch and winding illumination. By creating one flash at a time, we get a better idea of how they work together, and make sure they are in tune with each other.
10. Change your background
The green screen can be turned into any color you want with some simple Photoshop skills (Opens in a new tab). Just make sure there is no green in the subject (like the green balls here) or that this changes color as well.
If you want to use Camera Raw/Lightroom, head over to the Color Mixer Panel, use the Hue target tool and drag over the green background to change the color. The most powerful tool in Photoshop is the Color Range command. Of course, most of the best photo editing software (Opens in a new tab) It will save you what you need to modify in this way.
Use it to select green, then change to whatever color you want using the Hue/Saturation layer (or any other adjustment layer you want). If you want to remove the background completely (which is useful when stitching several frames), in Photoshop press Cmd / Ctrl + F for the search menu, then use the quick action to remove the background.
This article originally appeared in PhotoPlus – The Canon Magazine. If you are interested in Canon, see the file best canon camera (Opens in a new tab) And the best canon lenses.