Take professional portraits for peanuts

With just £75, is it possible to build a home studio? James Paterson takes a budget DIY approach to lighting portraits with bin bags and an old brolly!

- James Paterson

With a cost-of-living crisis, spiralling inflation, eye-watering petrol prices and an unprecedented fall in living standards to consider, for many of us, shelling out money on photography kit or a trip to a professional portrait studio just isn’t a priority at the moment. But there are ways to create outstanding portrait photos without expensive costs.

In this project, we set ourselves a challenge: to craft high-end studio portraits on a shoestring budget of only £75, which was basically enough to buy two cheap second-hand flashguns and a green sheet for the backdrop. We supplemented this with a few items found around the house – an old garden bag, a bust brolly, bin liners and kitchen foil – to build our own DIY home studio.

The key to studio lighting is in enlarging and softening the light source so that it becomes gentle and flattering. This usually requires light modifiers like umbrellas and softboxes. But these can be expensive – a typical large softbox costs upwards of £50. Parabolic umbrellas can be equally pricey. So, if you want to save a bit of cash but still get high-quality lighting, why not build your own? As well as our DIY modifiers, we’ve also opted for a green screen studio setup. A green screen might seem like a luxury for our shoestring studio, but a chroma key sheet costs as little as £5 on eBay and its versatility means we won’t need to buy lots of other colour backdrops. Instead, with simple digital trickery, we can transform the green into any colour, or drop in an entirely new backdrop.

SHOESTRING STUDIO PRO PORTRAITS AT HOME

Get set up at home with a two-speedlite studio and create stunning family photos