Your Home Portrait Business

Last week I was in Nottingham & London for the ‘Your Home Portrait Business’ seminars for Calumet. The seminar was all about running a portrait business from home, without the additional overheads of a high street studio, how to scout for locations to shoot in, what equipment you require and the lighting kit for on-location use. Plus I discussed the importance of having a website which your visitors can find and how to get indexed in Google for free traffic to your site and much much more…

Katie Green was the model for the day. Katie is now one of the leading models in the country. She’s not only a great model, but a joy to work with and a good friend too. I’ve now been working with Katie for about 5 years or so and her work keeps on getting better.

Calumet are one of the leading photographic retailers for pro-photographers in the UK, Europe & USA. I’m quite proud & privileged to be invited by them on a regular basis to present seminars & workshops at their various branches in London, Birmingham, Nottingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Glasgow & Belfast.

All these images were shot with just one Nikon SB900 mounted on a lightstand and shot through an umbrella. The remote flash was triggered by the SU800 commander unit mounted on a Nikon D3s with a 105VR lens. These images were shot inside and around the Calumet store and the aim of this exercise was to look out for interesting and simple backdrops which enhanced the images.

The Nikon creative lighting system is ideal for indoor and outdoor remote flash lighting for portraits. Controlling the ‘remotes’ from the master is extremely easy and you control them from the point you are shooting.

After the shoot, the images were downloaded to my Mac Book Pro and were processed using Apple’s Aperture 3. The editing workflow is such that you spend minimal time in front of your computer and be able to process these images as shown in this post. The key to this is getting the images right in-camera so you start off with a good image and to make it better is pretty painless and quick.

The lighting kit I used was made by Calumet and comes in a handy carrying case. Lastolite produce a good lighting kit for on-location purposes. You can use either the SB800 or a SB900 as your remote flash.

Many thanks to Jason, Emma & the team at Calumet for their warm hospitality and looking after us. Many thanks to Loxley Colour for providing a £100 Gift Voucher to every attendee.

Oz

Related posts:

1. Creative Lighting with Wireless Flash
2. Your Home Portrait Business
3. Foto SF Open days at Calumet
4. SWPP Member’s Day Training
5. Focus on Imaging 2010 – NEC, Birmingham

Tags: Calumet, Off-camera Flash, Portraits, Seminar