One of the cooler ways to create a clean looking video is to shoot it against a white background (if you don't believe me check out our steel wool light painting tutorial).
It only took about $100 and an afternoon to build the studio
We got a ton of mails asking how we built this setup, so here is the breakdown:
Portable light box comes in handy for most product photography work. We did feature a cardboard light tent way back, but it was not collapsible. How can we say no to collapsible. With collapsibility in mind Kumaran Alagesan went and made a tent for $5.
For me one of the questions when seeing a photograph in an interesting interior is often how did they find the house, how did they get permission to shoot there and how did they squeeze all the lighting gear inside.
Photographer Mark Wallace shows how it's done. They don't go looking for a house, they build a small set out of a few pieces of wood. Mark gives us the full walk through of a set he build for a recent book cover shoot. Everything that is not in the frame is one big don't care, which makes the set building way easier than it sounds.
This clip is the first of two parts, so check out Mark's channel for the follow up next week.
Set Building via iso1200
If you are looking at video productions it is often seems that there are big lights, big setups and big budgets involved. Surprisingly, this is not always the case.
Pye from SLRlounge just released a behind the scenes video for his latest production, a video for kickstarter presentation of the One camera bag system (kinda cool bag regardless of the video).
Pye used (almost) nothing but Homedepot lights to create the entire setup. Here is the video below (the resulting product intro video is after the jump)
Having dealt with all kinds of spaces to shoot in, I can say that having to deal with a small space to shoot portraits is one of my worst fears. (This is why I conquered the basement in our new house).
Seeing the huge studios of folks like Zack Arias or Scott Kelby can have a paralyzing effect and send you on a the road to Im-never-gonna-make-anything-good-with-my-space trip.
If you have ever taken your monitor outside, you know that it is hard to see it clearly with all the light that is bouncing around. And even more so on a sunny day on a sunny location. Of course, you could always buy one of them Monitor Hoods. but it would be so nice to make one of your own. Especially when it only takes a few minutes and costs almost nothing.
In this tutorial, Roger Sacul will show us how to make a quick and simple DIY monitor hood. The one here is used on flat screens, but you can also use it for laptops, or build smaller version for camera hoods.
What if you wanted to make the main post of the PVC light stand (as described by The Frugal Filmmaker) to be telescoping? Here's one option for adding telescoping sections to just about any PVC project. It's quick, easy, and very inexpensive.
This telescoping element came from a mic boom I had made. There were two reasons I made it: one was to hold the mic in position for doing some street side interviews and the other was to enforce the 3' minimum focus distance of the Kodak Zi8 I was using (to keep the interviewee in focus).
This first photo is of the telescoping boom mounted on the side of a tripod.
The Lastolite Hilite is a really neat, light weight, and portable high key background that can double as a softbox. Oh, did I forget to mention what a bargain it is? It’s not really – it is more than well outside of our reach. Still, I was intrigued by the simplicity of it and the many ways it could be used for still photography and video work. (Look here to see some nifty example videos of the Hilite and high key backgrounds.) I set out to make a DIY version and not break the bank in the process.
The first attempt was to suspend two flat white sheets that were safety pinned together around the periphery over a rectangular frame at the top. Two 45 Watt second slave strobes ($25/ea) were inside on light stands ($21/ea). I have no photos but it was leaning slightly on the positive side of the spectrum between abysmal failure to resounding success. It was at least successful enough to prove out the feasibility of the DIY concept…
If you have lots of lenses, getting them all stored and neatly organized can be a drag. Personally, I use a cupboard but swear every time I need to get to one of them lenses that are on the back line.
Flickr user Stargazer95050 found a super clever way to organize his lenses. It seems like he is obsessed with organized lenses, this is his second clever Lens storage solution, The first one was using a cutlery tray. So aside from IKEA stopping to make the cutlery tray, he also needed a way to quickly move the lenses to his van while retaining easy lens access.
If you own one of them 90's film cameras and stopped using it because digital is so hip right now, you're gonna dust it off once you're done reading this tutorial.
In this tutorial photographer Richard Hill is going to explain how to convert your old film camera combined with a strobe into a background generator (which pros also like to call Cookie Projector or a gobo projector).
We featured a strobe based background generator before, which was based on a box and Fresnel lenses. This time around the shades can be way more delicate. Here comes Richard:
