How to Build a Simple Portrait Lighting Kit at Home

When it comes to formal portraiture, fashion, glamour, or even making good photos for eBay sales, nothing sets your work apart as a professional more than the ability to illuminate your subjects with a several lights, in order manipulate the shadows and highlights and render true color. If you think about it, photography is in large, the science and art of manipulating light. As with the great classic painters,photographers can make their images better by painting with light, duplicating various natural lighting conditions inorder to capture and convey the images the way you want to.

Although electronically integrated on-camera lighting systems found built into modern digital cameras are nothing short of miraculous in their abilities to calculate and adjust various lighting components to produce sharp images and realistic color without very little thinking--the limitation of having the main light source for indoor photography next to the lens is insurmountable.

This arragement can only produce what is often called flat or pancake lighting. It is very two-deminsional, and not often complimentary to subjects. Perhaps the worst example of this defect is notoriously found in driver's license photos. It is the exagerated pancake lighting that makes these photos so awful.

The results will always be somewhat amateurish until one or more light is used off-camera at various strategic angles relative to the subject and lens--creating highlights and shadows to cause the illusion of depth and three deminsionality. By doing so, you are able to narrow broad faces, de-emphasize double chins, broaden shoulders or busts, and make squat faces less so. You become a miracle worker in the eyes of your subjects.

To this end, I am here showing how to make a simple set of light-stands and reflectors that will render excellent professional results at home or on location. The whole set is inexpensive to make and portable to carry. It is not industrial grade, but it will work well and give you a jump on your learning curve as you begin to make better pictures. Results are indistiguishable from light sets costing thousands of dollars. One day you may want to upgrade to a commercial set of lights, but for now, for very little expense, you can start shooting with the big boys (and girls).

Any good set of lights will offer a minimum of three light-stands, with an optional fourth one on an overhead boom. My intention is to point you in the right direction. I am intentionally making this project easy and inexpensive enough for the least-funded and non-handy among us. Literally, any fifth-grader should me able to do this. Few tools are even required. If you have access to tools and know how to use them, the job becomes still simpler. (I own an entire metal-working shop incident to my gunsmithing, and I can make the finest set of lights ever seen,but this is not the purpose of this post.) This exercise is about simple, fast, and cheap while still providing functionality.

In this post, I am all about using whatever materials you can scrape together. For instance, in place of the inexpensive wooden dowels I use, old broom handles, and other items can be substituted for what I have used. However,as I have done it, the material cost is less than ten bucks for this kit--excluding the actual lights. You can purchase three or four simple lights and slave units for beans over eBay or from pawn shops, due to the glut of "old electronic flash units" on the market. Garage sales often render good finds for pennies, as do attics and storage sheds. Odds are that you have relatives or friends who have everything you need simply for the asking.

Materials that I have pictured include:

1. Four different diameters of wooden dowel.
2. A discarded cardboard paper towel spool.
3. Two discarded toilet paper spools.
4. A couple of pieces of discarded bubble wrap.
5. An empty pringles potatoe chip box.
6. An empty oatmeal box and lid.
7. A partial can of white spray paint.
8. A close hanger.
9. 1-two-way wood screw.
10. 1-nail.
11. A bundle of colored hobby foam of which I use one or two pieces. Othe rmaterials are easily substituted for this such as odd pieces or plastics, note-book covers, contruction paper, etc.

Tools pictured include:

1. A small hammer.
2. A hack saw.
3. A loose hack saw blade. Any kind of saw will work. The sawing is minimal.
4. A box cutter, sharp knife, scapel, or single-edged razor blade.

For the very ambitious these are other optional materials and tools that might prove useful (but which certainly are not required):

1. A hot glue gun with glue.
2. Velcro. (I find velcro almost as useful as duct tape.)
3. A battery-operated dremmel-type tool with standard accessories including a drill bit.
4. Duct tape (maybe).
5. Gorilla Glue (maybe).
6. More two-way screw like the one pictured.
7. Very, very optional: Hinges, fasteners, brackets, small wood screws, or a piece of very light metal to make hinges from if you really want to get fancy; if you decide to use the metal, you'd also benefit from a pair of tin snips and leather work gloves. Thin metal can cause bad cuts while working with it, so unless you know what you are doing just forget all this.
8. An old piece of fabric, leather, vynil, or canvas suitable for making a tote bag for your kit.
9.  Three or four snapable plastic ties, pipe cleaners, or pieces of string (any of these can be used to buddle your kit together for easy carrying.
10. Pices of medium sandpaper.
11. Fast-drying wood stain or varnish.

A. Begin by cutting the dowells into correct lengths with a saw. Fron the dowel of the largest diameter, cut off a 10 inch length. Then cut the remaining long piece into two equal lengths.

In my example, I cut two of the next largest diameter pieces of dowel into two pieces of equal lengths.

From the smallest diameter dowel cut off a foot length and then half the longer piece. Cut ONE of the resulting longer pieces in half. Save the remaining longer piece for fine tuning of the stands and other parts.

NOTE: I USED DIFFERENT DIAMETER PIECES PARTLY FOR AESTHETICS, AND PARTLY FOR BALANCE. ONE SINGLE DIAMETER DOWEL, SUCH AS A BROOM STICK WILL WORK FINE. JUST USE YOUR COMMON SENSE AND CREATIVITY HERE. IT IS NOT EVEN NECESSARY TO CUT THE DOWEL INTO DIFFERENT LENGTHS. ONE PIECE FOR THE UPRIGHTS WILL WORK TOO, BUT THEY SIMPLY ARE NOT AS PORTABLE. THIS IS NOT ROCKET SCIENCE.

B. Once the pieces are cut to length, you can begin assembly. If you are not sure of what you want your finished stands to look like, or how high, etc., wait until you've cut and assembled one stand before cutting the other lengths.

Generally, you'll want one stand to be for your main light. This stand should ideally be placed approximately at 45 degrees angle vertically above the subjects head. The subject is likely to be seated or lower. You'll also want it to be easy for you to reach. So, maybe six inches taller than you are is a good height, unless you are and elf or an NBA guard--in which case I shouldn't advise you anyway.

C. With the nail and hammer, punch a hole in the center of each end of the dowel. Do it a little at a time, pulling it out each time, and then going deeper. You can drill the holes if you want to but be careful as it is easy for a drill to slip from such a small surface. You are making pilot holes that your joiners (made from the two-ended screws or pieces of the clothes hanger). Depending upon the guage of the wire clothes hanger or other joiner and the size of the dowels, you'll want to experiment with how deep you'll need to go into the end of the dowel.

NOTE: AN OND CARPENTER TRICK WILL PREVENT YOUR DOWEL FROM SPLITTING; PLACE YOUR NAIL UPSIDE DOWN ON A HARD SURFACE AND USE THE HAMMER TO BLUNT THE POINT BEFORE BEGINNING TO USE IT TO MAKE THE HOLES.

C. When your uprights are assembled, the pieces of coathandgers or two ended-screws, whould be snug enough to provide the needed upright rigidity,but loose enough to be easily disassembled. The joined dowel pieces should be flush end-to end.

D. Next you will make and affix the stands. They will use the pieces of dowel like an old-style Christmas tree stand joined to the bottom of the bottom length of dowel at right angles in a + formation. Smaller pieces of the same size dowel are placed on the first piece of the stand to be affixed to the upright. This makes both pices of the stand level to one another.

I suggest a lot of design liberty for making the stands. Small flat pices of board may make for a more stable, albeit bulkier stand. A number 10 tin can filled with sand, rocks, or concrete is even more stable--but of course is bulkier. A single round or rectangle board, if available, may be more to your liking as a stand--centered and screwed on as a base.

You may even find something around the house to weigh down the stand and go around the upright for greater stability; a two or five pound barbell weight would be ideal. But in any event, the dowel method that I used will work.

D. The next part is to make the main light "head" a and multi-purpose diffuser. This is fashioned from the oatmeal box. Use the box cutter or a dremmel tool to custom cut the holes where you main off-camera flash will affix to the oatmeal box. With mine, I cut a hole with tree-sides, leaving a little tab that can be closed back over the hole when using one of the other holes to insert the flash--for different light coverage. This could be reenforced with duct tape if desired.