Home Portrait "Studio"

I put studio in quotes because it would really be a stretch of the imagination to call my setup a studio, but, lacking a better term, that's what I call it! And it works well enough.

Here's a quick shot of the setup:

We're lucky enough to have a large loft, which has gone from being a bedroom, to playroom, to now a part-time photo studio.

I put a couple of clamps onto the ceiling beams. On these clamps I attached some large zip ties - one on each side that holds the curtain rod at the highest level and then about six more on each side that are linked like chains and allow me to adjust the height of the curtain.

As for a backdrop, right now I'm using a large sheet, but am planning on replacing that with some (much) larger cloth backdrops. It helps to have a few contacts that are in the sewing business! As I take portraits, the plan is to slowly add one or two from my earnings.

Now for some sample images from this setup (all images, with the exception of the first, are untouched. The first one was only cropped):

The big thing I noticed is that I need more light on the backdrop - in this case I want it to be white, not the off-white it really is. It can be fixed in post-processing, but that's just one more step that can be eliminated with proper lighting. That and I need to iron the background before I take real pictures ... But I think that the subject lighting is pretty good.

I wanted to get some test shots in before I started taking "real" portraits!