Kiran Bhat Photography

I wanted to have a basement photo studio for a while now. This winter made it clear to me that I needed  to set it up so that I won't go the whole winter without doing photography. That would have been depressing. Initially I thought I'd have just one setup with black background but since I owned two different setups I decided to go with one white and one black background. They are not fancy but they do the job well. I hope I can do studio portraits till it gets nice outside! Here are the setup pictures. The Infinite black background with White Lightning X1600s The White background with Nikon SB28 and Olympus FL50R These are simple setups anyone can do in their basement/spare room. My basement is unfinished so there is no heat so I had to use the space heater to keep the area warm (not very effective unfortunately). I moved most of studio stuff downstairs so I have ready access to various light modifiers, reflectors etc. A few things that I ne

Gosh! Time flies, it's been more than 2 months since I updated my blog. Ooopss! So anyways, I was going through my flickr pages to do a self review of where I'm headed in terms of photography. Some big changes.... I have done way too many portraits, my post processing skills have improved, my style has changed from shooting a wide angle frames to a tightly cropped frames and most importantly I'm paying way too much attention towards the quality of the images. I no longer want/create dirty photoshopped looking images. I'd rather do minimalistic processing and work the camera, light and the setup of the shoot. I compare some of my portraits with some of the best in the infiniteness of the internet... to my surprise all those images have a real clean look. Major factors that define these images include minimalistic vignetting, eyes sharpened only around iris, skin retouched but not smoothened out, some sharp details around eyebrows, hair strands, finer shadows etc. I had

Recently a few people have asked me what gear I use, especially for the lighting part. Today I was organizing all my gear and I thought why not take pictures of them(okay, I was tempted to take pictures of them :D). So this is a gear post :). Click on the images to view large on flickr. White Lighting Kit - Recently I ordered some stuff from PC Buff. I was happy with my small flash kit. But I wasn't getting enough power at times and I hate to pump up the ISO. So I got the big lights, since I don't have a studio, I ordered a vegabond battery too. May be I need one more battery, so that each flash head gets dedicated battery... although a single battery can support up to 6 heads (WL tech spec :)). I also got Large Octobox and Beauty dish with grid and soft cover. I love the light output by WLs, when mounted on Octobox. Shadow areas are very soft and overall pleasing look. Then I have the 20deg grid which sort of gives a funky look. I am yet to put some color gels on flash he