Photo Stage Setup

This is the setup I use for photographing my models.

The shell of the stage is a cheap translucent plastic storage bin, lined inside with white cardboard.

I use three cool-white LED lamps, two from above and a lower-powered one providing some frontal fill lighting. The LED lamps are excellent for my purposes, as they're very bright but emit very little heat, so I can have the bulbs sitting right on the plastic bin without melting it or setting anything on fire — they do get a little bit warm, but not very, and the lights are never on long enough to cause an issue. They're not true daylight lamps, but they're fairly close in tone, close enough for digital editing in any case.

I have a pair of mirror tiles leaning against either side of the stage to bounce around a bit more of the light coming from overhead. The cards in front and at the back of the stage are for colour and tone calibration when I'm editing the images on my computer; they get cropped out of the final images.

I prefer to use a neutral grey backdrop most of the time, but I also use a white or black one. Occasionally I'll use a more decorative stage setup, but not often.

I always use the tripod. My camera these days is a Nikon D3500 DSLR with an 18 to 140 mm zoom lense. I don't yet have a flash for it, apart from the built-in one; my old Nikon TTL Speedlight turns out to be precisely the wrong model to be compatible with any modern camera. Hey-ho.