Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Start your own Portrait Studio Works from Home Business

Every year families, wedding parties and professionals hire portrait photographers. These photographers make their living doing photo shoots at studios. If you have extra room that can be devoted entirely to creating a portrait studio, you can be a portrait photographer who works from home business.

Obviously, you would need some familiarity with a digital camera, own a good camera and some lenses, plus obtain basic portrait studio equipment. There are many sites that cater to professional studio photographers, like prostudiousa.com that offers discounted rates and has everything imaginable for the professional portrait photographer.

Once you have the basic equipment, it’s time to set up the studio. The lighter the color of the walls, the better. Light colors will reflect light back onto your subject eliminating shadows which can distort features. If you are utilizing a very big room, you can partition parts of it off with white drop cloths strung on clotheslines or heavy duty cable.

Make sure there are plenty of lights in various locations. Portable and stationary lights are ideal and aim the lights at your background instead of directly on your subject. This will give your subject a more natural, sunlit look as opposed to harsh lighting directly on the face. The reflecting light gives the subject a softer appearance. It would be a good idea to purchase or read online about lighting techniques, and to experiment. This is the best way to learn.

Now the next question to answer is whether you will do your own printing or send your digital prints somewhere else. Obviously, if you do your own printing you will need to have high-quality professional printing equipment. By doing your own printing, you have complete control over the quality of the print, but you’ll also have to shell out big bucks and learn how to operate the equipment. If this isn’t something you can do quickly, but would like to do eventually, then begin learning about various photo printing processes and start saving. In the meanwhile, you’ll have to use a professional printing service.

It would be best to use a service that specializes in portrait photography rather than your local Walgreens store. There may be businesses in your area that specialize in portrait pictures, if not, there are plenty online, such as Newton Motophoto, Snapfish, and York Photo. These sites offer a variety of services. You will want to have the ability to offer your clients various photo options, such as size, finish, photo CDs, photo books, and various other amenities. Make sure that the site you choose to print your photos offers quality, a good price, and many features.

A portrait studio work at home business can be a very rewarding opportunity financially and emotionally for the right person. There is always room for expansion and technology is always changing, so there is also the opportunity to learn new and exciting photography techniques. A photographer that works from home business can start out small and grow into something as big as you would like it to.

No comments:

Post a Comment