 Oh, how's it? How's it guys? Today we are in a very echoey box, which is awful for sound, but great for turning into a home studio on a, hopefully, quite limited budget. The reason that I want to get a studio up here at the house again is that I'm missing taking personal portraits, despite the fact that I've used to take portraits. For a living, I loved being in the studio and painting with the light that came from my strobes. And I thought it'd be a great idea to show you that you don't need fancy setups, you don't need fancy gear, you don't need expensive stuff to create the same looking photographs that you see up here on the screen. Now, I'm not a gear channel, we don't do reviews on this channel, and this video is going to be no exception, right? The name on the side of all these things is kind of immaterial, right? I'm an Ellen Crom fanboy for various reasons, but really, the name on the side doesn't change what the light actually does. What you do with it is what's important. Now, I'll talk you through a couple of options because gear, when it comes to the strobes, can be a little bit confusing. Now, I will give you a couple of suggestions. This particular light here, which is the Ellen Crom Style FX400, I bought in 2009, and it's a workhorse, it's solid, it's all kind of good, it still does its job. But one of the things it can't do is go down really low powered, whereas someone like this, which is the Ellen Crom D-Light RX1, will go down really like a little boop sort of thing. So, you know, don't think that you need to go out and buy fancy equipment, very expensive things, these are probably like 100 quid a head. I don't know what these are because they don't make them anymore. But we'll stick a figure in the corner and find out, right? Now, we can make a whole video talking about modifiers for lights. This has a honeycomb on the front of it, which we're not going to use today. That's just there because I left it on there by accident, right? But you don't need a honeycomb, forget that's there, right? But what we are going to be using is a softbox. Okay, now the reason I use softbox is not umbrellas or something like that is because I prefer the control that I get with the softbox. It keeps the light a little bit more focused than a brawly. And it gives me what I feel nicer shadows. It mimics window light, which is a funny thing to say because, you know, we sort of say, well, you know, you can use ambient. But I want to be in control of the things. That's why I want to be in studio. I want to have full control over the light, whereas ambient can be very hit and miss. This is, yeah, the 1.5 meter rotoluxe by Elecron, which is an octa box. And now you don't need this. I have this because it is my favorite modifier and I just use it. But for a home studio, you really don't need this at all. It can be something a little bit smaller, like the standard softbox that you get with something, right? The only difference between the bigger softboxes and the smaller softboxes is either side of the catchlights in the eye, which is a very minor little thing, but also the quality of the shadows around the person in the image. So we need to trigger the flash heads somehow. And we're going to do that by using this. This is a very cheap radio trigger rather than a cable release. This cost me, I think maybe 10 quid when I bought it years ago. And again, like the flash heads, it just keeps on trucking, right? But if you put a cable release between your camera and the flash head, there is a invitation to Murphy to come along and trip over that and either break your camera or the flash head, neither of which you want to do. And you may recognize the voice of experience in that one. Now that you're triggering those strobes, right? This, this here out of focus is a light meter and you can use this to measure what the light is falling on the subject. Now you don't have to use this because obviously you can just suck it and see with with instant preview these days. But knowing what the light is going to do, knowing what it is actually falling and how it's falling on the subject is a very good habit to get into. So if you do want to invest in one of these, I would highly recommend it. But making sure though it works with strobes because not the basic flash meters do they just work on ambient light, but this one will work on a strobe. As a photographer and YouTuber, I spend a lot of time sitting down, you know, either editing photographs or, you know, editing videos or talking to your couch, right? So I needed to find something that would at least get me on my feet some part of the day. And it was around about this time when I was thinking about it, that the great people at Maid's site who make this awesome desk reached out to me and they said, look, you know, Alex, do you want to just try out this desk? And I was like, yes, yes, of course. And I have to say, I was a little bit not sure at the beginning because I wasn't sure how natural it would feel to stand up and do work. But I had to, it is, it feels completely natural. It's awesome to actually stand and work. You know, to be able to shift with just the touch of a button because it's all, you know, it's electronic power. I mean, look at this. No effort whatsoever. It's like magic, isn't it, right? To go between down here and standing up. My son thinks it's amazing. Of course, you know, four-year-olds. This is just like, because I pretend like I'm like elevating somebody into magic shows. And you know, it's got space for my coffee because that's always important. And actually, it's a huge improvement over my last desk. So if you are thinking about getting yourself a standing desk that has the ability to switch between, you know, sitting and standing without any sort of effort, you don't have to fuss underneath there with, you know, bolts and what have you. It just does it all at the touch of a button. Plus has a USB charger here so I can just charge my phone, which is, you know, which I love all that sort of stuff. And I have to say, I was extremely impressed and they have a Black Friday cell going on right now. Immediately, depending of course, when you're watching this video and I'll put the link in the description box below for you if you are interested in checking one of them out. Now this is a wall. Of course, right? So this is where I'm going to be photographing against. Now you can, depending on where you live and what your walls look like, photograph the wall as it is. Now a lot of people do this, certainly I did it in the studios as well. And it really, it's a really good looking shot that works quite nicely, especially if you have a corner like this where there's nothing else behind you. But if you don't have a wall like this, you're probably going to want to put up some sort of backdrop. And this is where you have a couple of options. Now ultimately what I'm going to do in here is put some brackets on the wall and hang my custom background off of it. But if you don't want to draw holes in your wall or if it's a very temporary setup that you're going to be having, you can use a background stand. So it's something like this and you have some teleporos, you know, they come up and you just hang the pictures on it. Which is what I'm going to do today to show you one of the drawbacks. If you're working in a small space about putting a background stand up. Hey, and there we go. So already, does this look like the same room? No, it is. But of course it is because you can hear the echo because it's just like this is how we roll here on TV. It's just echoes. So basically this canvas backdrop is not a fancy expense of Olifant backdrop. Of course it isn't. It's simply painted cotton duck that you could buy from any sort of canvas supplies. You can buy it raw. It doesn't need to be folded or anything. It can be rolled or what have you. And you just take it and you just paint it. You put a primer on it and you do a whole job and it's done. These things, that cost me 100 pounds to put together, including the dowel stick. Which is what I usually use to hang it from the roof. One of the benefits of hanging it from the roof is that often the wall is that it hangs flat. You'll have noticed that this is not hanging particularly flat. So if you do get some lights coming across it is going to show a bit of a wonky effect. However, you can use these things to your advantage. Not everything has to be perfect. Now, the big drawback of using a system like this where you have, you know, stands that you're working with. Is that the stands pop out from the wall. So you're going to lose, in this case, I've lost a foot and a half of distance. Which for this room is not a problem for me, but it might be for you in whatever room that you are dealing with. Okay. All right. So now I've set up the octabox in the corner here. Nice and simple. And you can see it's lighting me. It's probably a little bit low. That's because I didn't actually set it up properly. It's higher basically. I want the strobe head to be higher than my head. And then pointing down because that's how the sun works, isn't it? Right. If you have the strobe low, then you get these kind of weird catch lights in the bottom of the eyes. Anyway. Right. So now I've got my little radio trigger and it goes like that. Did you hear that? All right. Turn that off. The only reason there's audio things is if you can't see the strobe. So that you know that at least it's fired, right? In a studio where it's just the one strobe, you know it's firing and it gets annoying really quickly. So turn it off. There's a few things that you can add into the studio that aren't going to set you back very much at all. And these are here. You can see this one's been through the walls quite a bit. But these are foam core boards that you can buy from any art supply store. I think they were like eight pounds a sheet. Something like that. There's a price on the back. There's probably eight pounds. There you go. And you can either use these as negative fill. You won't really see the effect here because there's no fill coming from that side, right? Or you can use them as reflectors like that. Hello. Now you don't need to spend tons of money on something like that. Just that. See the difference that has made already if you do like that. Perfect. Eight dollars. Just go with it. He says it's eight dollars, but it probably won't be. It'll be something else when I check it out. But it goes to show again, you don't need to spend a huge amount of money on things in the studio. The reason I'm showing you all of this about setting up a studio is because I want you to realize how simple it is. Not only to set up a studio, but also to understand that gear does not really play a huge difference in the images that you can create. All of the photographs that I have shown you on this video today have been set up or photographed rather using this setup. This setup is probably one of the most basic things that you can probably do. But I want you to think about it of like setting a stage on which your ideas can dance. That when you tap into the world of the strobe and the things that you can do with it, then you open up the possibilities for a lot of your other images, for creating motion, using motion trails, using painting with light, using so many exciting approaches. And understanding how light works on people, how a simple light like this can just make something look so much more professional. I'm going to put up on screen now the total that this came to and I'm interested to see exactly what it is too. Now to see studio photography in action by a master, would you check out this video here. Thank you ever so much for watching and I'll see you again soon.