Basic home studio follow up

[wsmith96]

Hi - it's been a while since I posted, but I have some pictures I'd like to submit for critique. This is a follow up to my previous post regarding a small home studio set up for a beginner. After all of the recommendations, I purchased a boom stand, a rouge flash bender portrait kid, and a second rogue flash bender with diffusion panels. I chose this set up for portability and upon recommendations on the boom stand from privatebydesign - the boom stand was an awesome recommendation!

So, I started with a self portrait using a single flash and a flashbender soft box, and I have to admit that it was hideous. I definitely won't be posting that here. But, I later started using a two flash set up with flash bender soft boxes to take some product style photography, which I will post here

My daughter collected some wild flowers and I took the opportunity to work on my flash photography skills with the flowers in a shot glass. The back ground is a black towel and I have not edited the photographs. These are straight out of the camera. I had a flash on the right set to 1/8th power, and one on the left set to 1/16th power. Ambient light was provided by the light in my dining room.

For those interested - the flowers are called Indian Paintbrushes and are very common to central Texas.

So how did I do for a first try?

Thanks for your feedback,

wes

 

[wsmith96]

and some more...

had to sneak in my Walther P38 in here.

 

[wsmith96]

here is a picture of how simple this setup was.

 

[IMG_0001]

Hi there,

First up, it is nice to hear from other members experiences with their home studio kit building as I also am currently looking into setting up a small studio kit for shooting still life and portraits.

As for comments on the images you provided, they show that you can go a long way without much kit. The pistol in particular looks good to me, and that is even though I'm not really a gun lover. In general, I'd say they are nice pictures, but the devil is there, lurking in the details...

A few examples I could point out. First, the lights appear to be clearly visible as reflections on the shot glass base in a few pictures (first and last for example) and these attract attention away from the subject and make the images a bit weaker. Some images also are a bit canted to the side it seems. Finally, in the first and last image, depth of field makes the bottom of the glass fuzzy, but may be not enough to make it clear if it was intentional or accidental. I'd either go for full blown out of focus at the base or in-focus everywhere.

Worth noting is that the second images makes a good job of leaving the lights reflections out and managing the DoF, although there might have been a bit of an over correction of the canting...

These are just my opinions and reflect what I would try to correct if these images were mine. Feel free to disregard my comments if you don't agree.

Best regards,