Basic Home Stuido for Portraits

[Head in the Clouds]

Hi All!

Wow there are so many new faces in here! It is great. The challenges are HUGE now! I haven't posted anything for ages, have been concentrating on my little home business, (Head in the Clouds Photography) and loving it. I've just been slowly doing invitations and photographs etc for family and friends, building up a decent portfolio (well... semi decent anyway!).

I have a question though about home studios. I have a few people who are interested in having shots of their 'baby bellies'. I usually just use a white sheet for the back ground and hope for a sunny day!?.

Does anyone have any tips to set up a reasonably inexpensive home stuido? ie: lighting, backgroud etc etc.

Also if anyone knows of any sites that have 'inspirational' baby belly shots or baby shots, let me know. I'm keen to get some ideas.

Hope everyone is well. The quality of the posts is exceptional yet again!

ps: just an example of the invites that i've done:

Kate.

[Head in the Clouds]

another....

[Tim Kirkwood]

Kate,

I really like the baby invite, It is a neat composition. Thanks for sharing. As far as your question I have light stands and ect. oon loan from a friend so i cant help ya much there.

Thanks for sharing your work!

Tim

[tmlphoto]

I've been using a black background (black muslin) with pretty good sucess for some portrait work. I also have some Alien Bee monolights and some umbrellas and softboxes as well. Not too expensive. Here is a shot of a newborn that I took the other day. The setup was one monolight with a shoot through umbrella. I laid the background over a large comfy chair.
http://tmlphoto.smugmug.com/photos/16347814-L.jpg

[Mongrel]

Hi Kate,

I was just looking at some basic lighting packages for a small portrait setup. I went to the Alien Bees website and found two that looked very interesting:

http://www.alienbees.com/digi.html

and

http://www.alienbees.com/beginner.html

I've heard that Alien Bee stuff is pretty good and these looked like two very nice basic packages that might work.