Studio setup at Arse Electronica - Saturday by Rich Gibson

I set up a studio with a seamless white background and professional flash lighting at the Arse Electonika 2010 conference (www.monochrom.at/arse-elektronika /)I spent about $80 renting lights and light stands and maybe $150 buying a wireless flash trigger for the camera, and a 9 foot wide by 35 foot long roll of paper, and maybe something else.

It is amazing how much of a difference, how much better results, you can get from simply using the right equipment!

The conference was Thur and Friday evenings and all day Saturday and Sunday.

It was in a different venue each day, so I had the opportunity to iterate over the process of creating an environment to allow for the capture of high resolution portraits.

I tried to copy images from the camera after each person ( I sometimes succeeded at that!) and I tried to stitch at least some of the images while the event was in progress.

This worked very well! I was able to get feedback reasonably quickly which allowed me to grow my techniques. I had some successes, and some failures, and a number of images which seem like 'failures' but which I think just need a few hours of time fine tuning and polishing...

In one case the 'real time' processing allowed me to realize that a particular portrait had completely failed, and I was able to retake the images to capture a portrait of a person who I really wanted to capture.

In 2008 I really had it driven into me how important it was to process (stitch) at least some of the images you take when you are at an event. I was at Burning Man and spent a day taking images. I brought the raw images into the stitcher and realized that the camera had missed a number of frames.

I was able to diagnose the problem, and fix it. I then retook the images which I thought were worth retaking, and then when I was given an opportunity to capture a 'once in a lifetime' (or at least once a year :-) shot I was able to do it with much more confidence that the shot would work out. (this shot in fact: gigapan.org/gigapans/8582/)So this is the third studio setup I created for the conference...in reality this is also the third (people as subjects sized) photo studio I have ever created :-)