My First Shot at Studio Lighting (and more photos of my beautiful sister!)

Here we are again, with some more photos of Brooke. But who’s even mad about it?? She just happens to be my sister, she lives close, and she’s highly photogenic, so it makes perfect sense to use her to practice my new ideas and techniques! And of course baby Leo got to hop in with Brooke for a shot and I had her do a few headshots of me, too :)

So the idea and technique this time around was indoor artificial lighting. A bit of background about light and why this situation was a little trickier than just taking photos outside like normal is that light comes in many different colors. I didn’t really start noticing this until I started getting into photography and learning about temperature settings and actually shooting indoors and outdoors back-to-back from each other (here’s a great post when I did indoor and outdoor shooting in the same session). Natural light, for the most part, tends to be very cool— thinks lots of blues. Indoor/artificial light tends to be very warm, mostly being yellow with a little bit of orange. With that being said, photography light bulbs are manufactured to mimic natural light pretty closely, so they are much more cool than most light bulbs. Even so, photography light bulbs still are not the sun, and still have some yellows and oranges in it. Bringing the two together, natural light and artificial light, can make a bit of a mess when editing. Sooo I set up a makeshift studio in my bedroom, of all places. I’m pretty cheap, so if I don’t have to pay money to shoot in a studio, I’m not going to. To prevent the artificial light mixing with the natural light, I taped paper bags over my windows to keep the natural light to a minimum. As an added bonus, it helped me control the direction the light hit Brooke’s face since my studio light was the only source of light I was using.

When I got to post processing, even though I shot with a cooler temperature than I usually do to help off-set the yellow-ness of the artificial light, getting the colors to look natural was a bit of a beast to overcome! I spent WAY more time editing these photos than I’d like to admit! And although I feel that these turned out pretty good, I would love to spend more time shooting and editing these situations to nail down the color and the lighting even more.

What do you think of my first shot at studio lighting? Is it something I should pursue? Would you ever consider having an engagement or bridal session done in a studio? Let me know in the comments!