what's your budget?

Ummm....less than $300 would be nice...

renting might be a great idea, especially if it's for a single gig

Get a cheap manual flash and use it on camera to bounce into the ceiling. It won't be pretty, but shooting in a small, white walled apartment will be a nightmare anyway and this will work better than floor lamps.

Until he spends his $300 on a 1-day rental and spends 8 hours figuring out how everything works

Hmm OK....the room is actually a pretty good sized, and we're using black and / or white backdrops if that matters....what is a good flash for this ?

Easier to turn a white wall into a black wall than vice versa

I cannot believe we've missed the most important tip...


...tell the models that in order to get the correct white balance you need a few frames of them totally nude. Report back with the pics.

If you want to go cheap, and you want to do a one light setup, get yourself a speedlight (vivitar 285HV for example), a sync cable and a hot shoe adapter (dont think the 50d has a socket, if it does you can skip the adapter), and a reflector (try a car sun shade, my fav), and some sort of diffuser. If you can spring for a shoot through umbrella and a stand (see here: http://www.mpex.com/browse.cfm/4,4636.html - you will need a swivel head and stand also).


then set it up like this:



play with the power of the flash (set manually on the flash itself) and also the distance of the the flash itself to the subject.

no, the black box at the bottom is just the camera, no flash on it at all. the thing to the right is a softbox, but you could use an umbrella as well. The flash is tether to the camera.

the oval on the left is a reflector.

softboxes don't typically come with any lightsource.

you can use any flash really, the vivitar 285hv is the one I suggested just because it's cheap and decently powerful. read about it here: http://strobist.blogspot.com/2007/02/return-of-classic.html

you don't necessarily need a softbox, you can get by with a shoot through umbrella, which is what I would suggest.

You can also go the DIY route and just setup a scrim of very light white fabric, like a linen light weave, and put that between the model and the flash.

If you want to go continuous lights, you can always buy some homedepot work floods like these: http://www.homedepot.com/Lighting-Fans-W...catalogId=10053 and put that behind a larger scrim to make a light panel.