Home Studio Essentials

Gavin Hoey calls the 5-in-1 reflector his key home-studio tool, with silver, gold, white, translucent and black flag surfaces. Lighting Dan with one StreakLight 360 at 90 degrees, he flags the white wall, adds silver on a boom beneath his face to light the eyes, re-metering for f/8.

Gavin Hoey adds a second flash, a StreakLight 180, as hair and separation light above Freya, who blows bubbles in profile. He meters f/8 on the face against f/4 on the hair, tests the two-stop gap, then in Photoshop composites extra bubbles from a bubble machine shot on black.

Gavin Hoey demonstrates honeycomb grids on his StreakLight 360, comparing a bare reflector's wide spread with a grid's tight pool and rapid fall-off. He photographs grime artist Iffy on the floor under a gridded key light for a street-lamp feel, adds a second gridded light and edits in Camera Raw.

Gavin Hoey turns a plain dark grey backdrop into almost any colour with a gelled background flash in his small home studio. Unlit grey records as black; red and yellow gels stack to make orange, the Streaklight remote sets intensity, and Camera Raw's HSL panel fine-tunes hue and saturation afterwards.

Gavin Hoey explains why a white backdrop photographs grey under a single key light, using the inverse square law and meter readings at f/8, then adds a second flash behind the model, metered about a stop brighter at f/11, for pure white. In Photoshop the polygonal lasso extends the background.

Gavin Hoey turns his largest softbox, on a RoveLight 600, into a pure white background for head and shoulders portraits in a small home studio, with a StreakLight 360 as key. Meter readings confirm the softbox is a stop brighter than the f/11 key without spilling onto the model's hair.

Gavin Hoey shows three ways to stop a model merging into a dark grey backdrop. After metering a single key light at f/5.6, he adds a second StreakLight as a hair light, repositions it to illuminate the background instead, then angles one light to catch both subject and backdrop.

Karl Taylor offers six tips for small studios: understand physics, since lights close to the subject bounce less; paint walls dark grey or black; use flags against spill; organise gear on trolleys and hooks; save floor space with ceiling tracks, booms and wall-hung backgrounds; and rent space when needed.

Pye Jirsa builds five portrait setups at home with a Sony A7C and Samyang 35mm, 45mm and 75mm f/1.8 lenses. The open door becomes a flat light source, the model moves to balance concrete bounce fill, a hand-painted backdrop adds Rembrandt-style directional light, and a phone torch lights one setup.

Laura BC, who builds a studio in every London flat she rents, lists minimum gear for an affordable home studio for portrait, fashion, product and self-portraits. She weighs flash against continuous light, recommending a Neewer flash and a similarly priced Godox LED with remote control, and covers softbox sizes.