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My name is Chris Ryan. I’m a photographer. We’re here at my studio, Chris Ryan Photography, in northwest Portland. If you’d like to see more of my work, please visit my website at chrisryanphoto.com, or if you’d like to follow my daily activities, go to my Facebook page, Chris Ryan Photography in Portland, Oregon. Today, I’m going to talk to you about studio photography. How to set up a portrait studio. Well, you can set up a portrait studio in just about any room. You need a little bit of ceiling height. I’d say a minimum of 8 to 10 feet. You need a distance from the subject of about 10 to 20 feet. And then from there, all you need is a roll of paper as a background. If you have a nice pretty wall that’s painted a pleasing color, then you can use that. Paper is nice because you can easily change the color, and/or texture of your background. Paper’s not the only option. As well, there’s muslin and/or fabric backgrounds. So once you’ve got your space, and you’ve got your background, then you need a couple lights…maybe three, maybe four. Two for sure to evenly light the front and sides of the subject. But then, if you’ve got a hairlight, and perhaps a back light or a side light. Sometimes known as a rim light or an edge light, that’s helpful as well. So you’ve got your space, your background, your lights. Now you need a good camera and tripod…end of subject. And that’s just about everything you’ll need to set up a basic portraiture studio.

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My name is Chris Ryan. I’m a photographer. We’re here at my studio, Chris Ryan Photography, in northwest Portland. If you’d like to see more of my work, please visit my website at chrisryanphoto.com, or if you’d like to follow my daily activities, go to my Facebook page, Chris Ryan Photography in Portland, Oregon. Today, I’m going to talk to you about studio photography. Photography techniques. There’s lots of fun techniques that you can apply to your photography to make it different, make it creative. One of those is light painting. The technique of light painting is done with a long exposure. Your camera’s mounted on a tripod, or a very stable position. And you open the exposure for, let’s say, 10 to 30 seconds. Your subject is in a dark, and/or dimly lit area. And then you introduce light artificially with a flashlight, or a pen light, essentially painting the light on or around your subject. It’s a very interesting and fun technique. If you don’t get it right the first time, don’t be discouraged. Just keep trying. Keep fine tuning your process. Another technique is motion blur, where you blur the subject, or your subject has lights in it. And you pan the camera or shake the camera in a way that those lights become streaked. If you’re supplementing that with some artificial light, or on-camera flash, you can pop the flash on your subject, which will freeze them. Nice, sharp, crisp image of that subject. And then you shake the camera a little bit, and it will streak the lighting in the background. So you’ve got a nice, crisp subject in front with sort of crazy fun artistic light streaks throughout the background. Another fun technique in photography is time-lapse. So those are a few techniques in photography that can give you a unique different look with just a little bit of effort.

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My name is Chris Ryan. I’m a photographer. We’re here at my studio, Chris Ryan Photography, in northwest Portland. If you’d like to see more of my work, please visit my website at chrisryanphoto.com, or if you’d like to follow my daily activities, go to my Facebook page, Chris Ryan Photography in Portland, Oregon. Today, I’m going to talk to you about studio photography. What is time-lapse photography? Time-lapse photography is when you have a camera taking a frame at a predetermined interval throughout a period of time. This could be a duration of an hour. It could be a duration of a day. It could be a duration of six months. So the procedure is to place the camera in a stationary position focused on a subject, and program it to take a frame every 10 seconds, every hour, three times a day. Depending on what your goals are. But essentially, time-lapse photography is photography done over a span of time from a constant position viewing the progression of a subject or subject matter.

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My name is Chris Ryan. I’m a photographer. We’re here at my studio, Chris Ryan Photography, in northwest Portland. If you’d like to see more of my work, please visit my website at chrisryanphoto.com, or if you’d like to follow my daily activities, go to my Facebook page, Chris Ryan Photography in Portland, Oregon. Today, I’m going to talk to you about studio photography. A little bit about portrait photography in general: we’ve set up a shoot here that is representative of a corporate portrait shoot, similar to a head shot, but a little bit more business like, a little bit more formal. So Marika, our model, is placed on a stool, that so she can be comfortable and get in the right position. We changed the background to something a little bit more professional; we have a backlight hitting the background, to give some separation between the subject and the background, doing a little contrast. I like to match what the subject is wearing with the color of the light that hits the background, and so, since Marika has sort of neutral tones in her attire and her skin, I’m chosen a color that sort of goes with the background, again, I think it gives it sort of a professional portrait look, and so the color I’ve chosen is blue. The lighting scenario is very sort of formal and straightforward: we have a main light here, off to her right and we have a fill light off to her left; they’re ratioed so that the main light is a little more powerful than the fill light and both of these have large soft boxes on them. And then back here we have a strip box which is functioning as an edge light, giving her a little bit of a stronger light on this side of her profile, and again, this is ratioed up a little bit, just a touch more than the main light, again, to give it that obvious edge and separate it from the rest of the lights.

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My name is Chris Ryan. I’m a photographer. We’re here at my studio, Chris Ryan Photography, in northwest Portland. If you’d like to see more of my work, please visit my website at chrisryanphoto.com, or if you’d like to follow my daily activities, go to my Facebook page, Chris Ryan Photography in Portland, Oregon. Today, I’m going to talk to you about studio photography. Okay, so a little bit about head shots, which is very similar to portrait photography, but we want to give head shots a little more of a fun lifestyle kind of look. Portraiture we do in the studio. Corporate portraiture a little more formal; but if it’s an actor, a model, even an athlete I like to do them outside. I like to give them that natural sort of lifestyle look to head shots. Today, it’s raining, so I’m shooting from a doorway to keep my equipment dry; and then our model, Marika, is outside in the rain with an umbrella, which is actually kind of a fun look. So, this is not a bad day for head shots. So you just sort of pose your subject in a natural way, little bit of a smile, little bit of a head tilt. If you can include some interesting part of the background then great; in this case, Marika has a nice umbrella, so that works for a tight shot, and then I’ll also widen out a little bit and include some of the tree in the background. So, that’s good, Marika, very nice.

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My name is Chris Ryan. I’m a photographer. We’re here at my studio, Chris Ryan Photography, in northwest Portland. If you’d like to see more of my work, please visit my website at chrisryanphoto.com, or if you’d like to follow my daily activities, go to my Facebook page, Chris Ryan Photography in Portland, Oregon. Today, I’m going to talk to you about studio photography. How to set up for a photo shoot. Well, most photo shoots involve an array of lights and a background. So the first thing you have to do is figure out how, what your lighting style is gonna be, how you want to light the scene. You’ve got a couple side lights, a front fill light, and a back light, or hair light. If you set up these lights in a way that reflects the style that you’re looking for, or works with the subject matter you’re working with. And then, again, the appropriate background. Whether it’s black or white, or table top. Every photo shoots needs lights, needs a background. Once you have all those elements together, then you’re able to make a nice frame in the studio.

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My name is Chris Ryan. I’m a photographer. We’re here at my studio, Chris Ryan Photography, in northwest Portland. If you’d like to see more of my work, please visit my website at chrisryanphoto.com, or if you’d like to follow my daily activities, go to my Facebook page, Chris Ryan Photography in Portland, Oregon. Today, I’m going to talk to you about studio photography. How to set up your photography studio for a white background. The first thing you want to do is change your background from whatever color you’re using to white, so we’ll do that. Now that we have the white background set up, basically the lighting is the same as a normal photo shoot. You light it depending on the style you want to portray, and/or the subject matter that you’re shooting. One thing about using white specifically is that sometimes you wanna throw some light on the background to make that background disappear. Just separate your subject from the white background. To essentially make it look as though the space goes on and on and on and on. As well, if you have some flaws in your paper, you can use the white light to cancel those out as well. And here we have a light that I would use for the background. Currently, it has an orange gel on it. We take the gel off…we take the grid out because we want a nice broad spread on the light. And if we’re working with a person, and we’re just doing a head shot, then we use the light directly behind them. Because the subject will block out the light, so you don’t see that lighthead. If we have a group of people where you can’t exactly position this light directly behind someone, the next best thing is to put it off to the side. And if you have two, you put another one off to this side. They both shoot at the white background, essentially making it disappear.

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My name is Chris Ryan. I’m a photographer. We’re here at my studio, Chris Ryan Photography, in northwest Portland. If you’d like to see more of my work, please visit my website at chrisryanphoto.com, or if you’d like to follow my daily activities, go to my Facebook page, Chris Ryan Photography in Portland, Oregon. Today, I’m going to talk to you about studio photography. How to set up a home based photo studio. Well, it’s pretty easy, actually. So, find a nice wall to work with. And I’ve chosen this wall in my home. Make the wall workable. You know, take off any art that you might have up. I’m going to use a sheet of blue for my home based studio. You can use any color that works for you. Whatever happens to go best with your subject matter. I’m just gonna tape it up with some black gaffer’s tape. Probably one of the most invaluable pieces of equipment in any photo studio…a role of gaff tape. And so this is essentially appropriate for portraiture, depending on how wide your subject is, you might go a little wider. If it’s a head shot, this is perfectly appropriate. The subject goes here. Again, if we’re doing just a head shot, this is a perfectly sized area. And so, in your home based studio, you almost always should have, ideally, some artificial light. Because you can’t necessarily always set up next to a bright window. So here’s an example of portable lighting. These are called speed lights. And if you have these at sort of a 45 degree angle to your subject, then you would have some nice even clean artificial light to go with your home based studio.

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My name is Chris Ryan. I’m a photographer. We’re here at my studio, Chris Ryan Photography, in northwest Portland. If you’d like to see more of my work, please visit my website at chrisryanphoto.com, or if you’d like to follow my daily activities, go to my Facebook page, Chris Ryan Photography in Portland, Oregon. Today, I’m going to talk to you about studio photography. So, studio lighting techniques. The technique I’m going to be talking about right now is edge lighting or rim lighting when it applies to portraiture. Our model, Marika, is in the center of this array of lights. We have two to her side, and these are creating the edge, or the rim lights. And then we have a light in back here with a colored gel, an orange gel that is hitting the black background. And I chose orange because it matches Marika’s hair as well as the tone of her belt. It gives a little bit of contrast between her and the background. And as a front light, we have a beauty dish that is ratioed down a bit as compared to the edge lights. We want a nice strong edge to get her shoulders, the side of her face, and her hair to give her a nice edge. And then the beauty dish in front is just filling it. That’s one technique in studio photography…edge light.

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My name is Chris Ryan. I’m a photographer. We’re here at my studio, Chris Ryan Photography, in northwest Portland. If you’d like to see more of my work, please visit my website at chrisryanphoto.com, or if you’d like to follow my daily activities, go to my Facebook page, Chris Ryan Photography in Portland, Oregon. Today, I’m going to talk to you about studio photography. Food photography basics. The basics of food photography are even light, a neutral background, and some sort of shallow depth of field. Selecting your focus on the important part of the plate. And, that’s, you know, another one of these basics is finding that face. If it doesn’t have an obvious face or front, then take some time to rotate the plate. See which side looks best. Typically, you light it evenly. Often times, food lighting is natural lighting. Ideal is good window light. And then bouncing that window light back to the other side of the plate to fill it. And then, again, selecting your focus in a way that still implies that there’s more there. So you don’t wanna completely crush out the rest of the plate. But you do want that depth of field to softly fall off into the background.

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My name is Chris Ryan. I’m a photographer. We’re here at my studio, Chris Ryan Photography, in northwest Portland. If you’d like to see more of my work, please visit my website at chrisryanphoto.com, or if you’d like to follow my daily activities, go to my Facebook page, Chris Ryan Photography in Portland, Oregon. Today, I’m going to talk to you about studio photography. I’d like to talk a little bit about the different types of lighting available for photography. Artificial light for photography ranges really from your bounce card or your reflector, all the way up to studio lights and beyond that to arena lights. The basics are that reflector that bounces a little bit of natural light, or even a little bit of artificial light in a direction that you want it. And then, we move on to small portable lights that can be mounted on the shoe of the camera. And often times, those can be also controlled by a radio transmitter. And so you can have your small compact portable light now be a directional light, because you’ve got it off camera, way off to the side.
And then you have studio lights. They all come with the ability to attach a modifier to it. An umbrella, or a soft box. And then you go all the way up to your arena lights that are mounted up in the corners of arenas to light up an NBA game. But that’s the basics about photography lighting.

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My name is Chris Ryan. I’m a photographer. We’re here at my studio, Chris Ryan Photography, in northwest Portland. If you’d like to see more of my work, please visit my website at chrisryanphoto.com, or if you’d like to follow my daily activities, go to my Facebook page, Chris Ryan Photography in Portland, Oregon. Today, I’m going to talk to you about studio photography. Choosing the right studio photography lights. Well, there’s a wide range of stuff available out there, that’s for sure. It always kind of comes down to what is your budget, and what are your needs. There’s a lot of off brands out there that can get you started and get you working right away. The more you can spend on a light kit or the brand of the kit, the more flexibility you have. And so, if you’re just starting out, weigh those options. How much flexibility do you need? What is your budget? And then, get what you can afford. A good midrange kit will give you the ability to add light modifiers, light grids to sort of spot your light, and diffuse the lights. Another very handy modifier is the mola dish, or the beauty dish. So, look at what your budget is, what your needs are, and go from there.

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My name is Chris Ryan. I’m a photographer. We’re here at my studio, Chris Ryan Photography, in northwest Portland. If you’d like to see more of my work, please visit my website at chrisryanphoto.com, or if you’d like to follow my daily activities, go to my Facebook page, Chris Ryan Photography in Portland, Oregon. Today, I’m going to talk to you about studio photography. How to take studio quality pictures at home. Well, there’s a few basics. The first thing you can do to achieve that is find a neutral background in your home. Whether it’s a wall that’s painted all the same color, or you can set up something against that wall to make it neutral. A sheet of white paper or a sheet of colored paper, depending on what you’re looking for. Some of the newer cameras have a nice built in pop up flash that can be adjusted so that it doesn’t give too hard of a light. But ideally, if you have a portable light that you can set off to the side, that’ll give you some nice directional light. Which will sort of mimic what you can do in the studio. And then, if you don’t have any artificial lights, the next best thing is to position your subject near a window. And if it happens to be a very sunny day, and that light is just very harsh, just put a sheet up over the window, which will diffuse that light in a very pleasing way.

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My name is Chris Ryan. I’m a photographer. We’re here at my studio, Chris Ryan Photography, in northwest Portland. If you’d like to see more of my work, please visit my website at chrisryanphoto.com, or if you’d like to follow my daily activities, go to my Facebook page, Chris Ryan Photography in Portland, Oregon. Today, I’m going to talk to you about studio photography. Some photography tips. Always be creative…always be fresh. Always be looking for a new angle, or a new way of looking at things. A good camera is always a good tip. Today, most manufacturers make great cameras at a great affordability rate. There’s a wide range of products available, all of which can help you make a fine photograph. Now, when you’re composing a shot, always look for the lines in your frame. Look at how the lines line up with the frame itself. Sometimes you can line up your composition so that the lines in your subject complement the lines of the frame. Whether it be the top of the frame, or the sides of the frame, or even an angle through the frame. And lighting is another thing to consider. Don’t always look for the best brightest light. Sometimes it’s best to look for a directional light. Good window light is always beneficial in good photography. Place your subject next to a window so that the light is directional across their face, or whatever the subject may be. Always keep light in mind, whether it’s an obvious directional light, or if it’s just a soft even natural light. These are some tips to good photography.

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My name is Chris Ryan. I’m a photographer. We’re here at my studio, Chris Ryan Photography, in northwest Portland. If you’d like to see more of my work, please visit my website at chrisryanphoto.com, or if you’d like to follow my daily activities, go to my Facebook page, Chris Ryan Photography in Portland, Oregon. Today, I’m going to talk to you about studio photography. Top food photography tips. Some of my top tips in food photography are, great window light bounced back onto the plate. Find a window that has some ideally diffused light. We’re here in Oregon, so we have a lot of diffused light coming through the windows. You want to avoid bright streaming sunlight. Find a window with some nice diffused light. Get a reflector, or a white card, a white bounce card, and bounce that light back onto the plate. Another tip is, you can use artificial light if you’re in a restaurant that is dark. Place a light behind the plate, and then bounce the light back. So the artificial light fires through the plate, which gives it sort of an edge. Gives it some highlights as that light passes over it. But then you bounce it back on to the front of the plate, which exposes the whole plate.

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“My name is Chris Ryan. I’m a photographer. We’re here at my studio, Chris Ryan Photography, in northwest Portland. If you’d like to see more of my work, please visit my website at chrisryanphoto.com, or if you’d like to follow my daily activities, go to my Facebook page, Chris Ryan Photography in Portland, Oregon. Today, I’m going to talk to you about studio photography.

How to choose a good studio photography kit. Every studio needs certain elements to cover all the bases. The first thing you need are some lights, a good camera, a couple different lenses. You need a lens for portraiture, so let’s a 50 mm, ideally F 1.4, that’s a good all-around portraiture lens, and then a good macro lens is very useful as well for product photography. So you’ve got your camera, you’ve got your lights, you need a background, or multiple backgrounds, but if I’m just going to choose one, I’m going to choose a roll of white paper and a nice stool, or chair, to position your subject on if you’re doing portraiture, a little table to do tabletop work, a nice tripod, wireless radio transmitters to fire your lights, if not you can always use a long cable.”

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My name is Chris Ryan. I’m a photographer. We’re here at my studio, Chris Ryan Photography, in northwest Portland. If you’d like to see more of my work, please visit my website at chrisryanphoto.com, or if you’d like to follow my daily activities, go to my Facebook page, Chris Ryan Photography in Portland, Oregon. Today, I’m going to talk to you about studio photography. How to create a makeshift studio for studio photography? Well, the first thing you need are a couple of lights, you’ll need a wall or a flat surface and ideally a roll of white paper. You set things up a little bit differently depending on what you’re doing-whether it’s product photography or portraiture, but those are the basics – you start with a couple of lights, a white background and then you go from there. If it’s a product that you’re shooting, then you create a tabletop surface, maybe attached to the white background to a wall and have it sweep across the table, position the lights on the sides and a bit over your product and then the lights bounces off of the back wall. If you’re doing portraiture, then of course you wouldn’t have the table, you would just have the subject in front of that white wall. Again, light them directionally. Different studios can be set up in different ways, but the basics are a couple of lights, a blank wall and some creativity.

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“My name is Chris Ryan. I’m a photographer. We’re here at my studio, Chris Ryan Photography, in northwest Portland. If you’d like to see more of my work, please visit my website at chrisryanphoto.com, or if you’d like to follow my daily activities, go to my Facebook page, Chris Ryan Photography in Portland, Oregon. Today, I’m going to talk to you about studio photography.
Well, first thing you have to consider is what are you shooting, what do you need shot? Different studios, different photographers have different styles and or they specialize in different things. Look around for a studio that specializes in exactly what it is that you want to be photographed, whether it is food or products or apparel or models or head shots or portraiture. Then look at their style, each photographer and again each studio has a different style even if they are shooting the exact same thing. Figure out what it is that you want to shoot. Find a studio that can do that and then look at their styles that each one represents. Choose the one that best reflects the style that you want to portray.
A third element is the photographer themselves and each photographer is a little different, all of them are generally easy to work with, but half the time you will find that you work better with one specific photographer. so once you have narrowed things down; meet with the studio, meet with the photographer, see what works best for you”

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My name is Chris Ryan. I’m a photographer. We’re here at my studio, Chris Ryan Photography, in northwest Portland. If you’d like to see more of my work, please visit my website at chrisryanphoto.com, or if you’d like to follow my daily activities, go to my Facebook page, Chris Ryan Photography in Portland, Oregon. Today, I’m going to talk to you about studio photography. What is studio photography? Studio photography is typically photography done within a controlled environment, indoors, under lighting conditions that artificial, but easily manipulated. Studio photography can involve product photography, food photography, portraiture; we live here in Oregon where it rains a lot, so it’s valuable to have a studio, especially if you do a lot portraiture, and especially on a day when you can’t get outside to do that. Studio photography also involves large subjects like vehicles or large groups of people like teams, athletic teams; as well, studio photography often times involves white backgrounds, or white paper sweeps, or in the case of very large studios we have coved walls and corners, and light grids in the ceilings to hang lights from in a very specific array or manner.

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My name is Chris Ryan…I’m a photographer. We’re here at my studio, Chris Ryan photography in northwest Portland. Most of what I do happens here in this space. I’m lucky to be in a building that has one of the premier rental sound stage facilities in the northwest. So if it’s a big item, then we leave our quaint and cozy little space here on the second floor of the Northwest Production Center. We come downstairs to the big space. This is Cine Rent West. It’s one of the premier rental sound stages in the pacific northwest. And when we have a big production, a big shoot, big products, lots of people. We come down here. We’ve got a full array of lighting equipment. Lots of grip equipment. Just about anything we’d need for a great big production. And it’s just downstairs from Chris Ryan photography. I’ve been a photographer professionally for about 10 years. If you’d like to see more of my work, please visit my website at chrisryanphoto.com. Or if you’d like to follow my daily activities, go to my Facebook page. Chris Ryan photography in Portland, Oregon. Today, I’m going to talk to you about studio photography.

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My name is Chris Ryan. I’m a photographer. We’re here at my studio, Chris Ryan Photography, in northwest Portland. If you’d like to see more of my work, please visit my website at chrisryanphoto.com, or if you’d like to follow my daily activities, go to my Facebook page, Chris Ryan Photography in Portland, Oregon. Today, I’m going to talk to you about studio photography. How to find a studio photography job. You can find studio photography jobs by finding the local studios in your area, giving them a call, and seeing if they need assistance. One of the best ways to break into studio photography is as an assistant. Often times studios will have internship programs, or big studios will have several assistants working on a full time basis. Look in your area, look online, see who’s doing what work in your area. Sometimes you don’t even have to have a lot of experience, especially with those studios that do have internships. They’re looking for new talent, young talent that’s passionate and ambitious, and has a drive for studio photography.