Cheap Photo Tip: White Bed Sheet

In photography, it's all about lighting. Natural light is the best for many things, but not always in the package that Mother Nature delivers.

Dramatic sunlight in the early morning and evening will give you blazes of color and beautiful photos. Hazy days can produce a wonderful soft glow that's diffuse and subtle.

This is the light that we often try to mimic in a studio or on location with softboxes and umbrellas. A softbox tames the harsh light from a strobe or hot light into a dramatic diffuse glow of light.

As a magazine photographer, I have to travel light (at least for the magazine that I work for), carrying around more equipment that I can carry isn't an option (I have no assistant). In fact, carrying less than I need is SOP. Rather than pack softboxes and big light kits, I've come up with ways to get great shots with little extra baggage. One trick involves a big white bed sheet.

When I check in to a hotel room, I make sure to get a king sized bed. This way I get the biggest sheet available. When I shoot house interiors, I can hang the sheet in front of a bank of windows to diffuse the light into a glow rather than a harsh blaze of light. This evens out the light making it easier to balance the whole shot. Hang the sheet with all the usual tricks: spring clips, thumb tacks, duct tape, and voodoo.

You can also hang the sheet between a couple of light stands, step ladders, doors, bookcases, or some combination and place job lights or clip on lights from the hardware store with big bulbs behind it. This will do the same thing: give bright diffuse light to balance a room.

Tip: Fitted sheets are easier to drape over curtain rod ends.

What travel tricks do you have?

Rain-proof Your Camera for Free

Hotel room goodies can keep you dry on a rainy shoot, diffuse the light on a sunny shoot and keep your filters clean and safely packaged.

Because I shoot home building job sites quite often, I don't have the luxury of choosing which weather I'll work in. If it's dumping rain, many builders will typically bail out (pun), but a drizzle won't stop most of them (especially in Oregon). If I want to get my shots, I have to be ready.

Here's a tip I got from National Geographic magazine. Robert Caputo and Cary Wolinsky wrote a column in the front-of-book section My Seven. It's an interesting column because it's really more about the author than any particular thing. It's an interesting use of magazine space; Henry Kissinger's "My Seven" is likely to ba quite a bit different than Ozzy Osborn's.

Much of Robert and Cary's Seven focus on setting up a temporary photo studio in your hotel room, but a couple of items about location shooting. Among the most useful: hotel room shower caps make a great rain shield for your camera. You can cover the whole camera leaving the front of the lens exposed (a clear shower cap allows you to see the knobs and the display screen on the back of the camera body). They also reccommend grabbing the shower curtain to use as a light diffuser (or additional rain protection) which is a pretty good idea, but I often need a larger diffuser on an architectural shoot, so I reserve rooms with King size beds and grab the bed sheet. Fitted sheets have conveniently rounded corners which makes them easier to hang from curtain rods or other stationary objects.

Bonus tip: Carrie and Robert suggest using the shoe mitt for cleaning filters, but I also like to use it to dry the inevitable water droplets on the front of the lens...

Cheap Photo Tip: Duct tape and Step Ladders

You can triple the height of your tripod by spending five bucks at Home Depot.

One thing that can make a photo especially interesting is to get an angle that most people will never see. Down low or up high are two obvious options. On architectural photo shoots, I try to gain elevation for exterior shots; getting lower doesn't lend itself to shooting a house (it can be great for interiors thjough and it's awesome for shooting kids and dogs). The magazine I work for is big on quality photos, but small on budget; we send me alone with as much photo gear as I can carry rather than sending me with a lot of assistants, catering crews, and boom trucks (to be fair though, they do encourage me to eat well and stay in nice hotels when I'm on the road).

With low budgets, it pays to be resourceful. I used to climb up the homeowner's extension ladder leaned against a tree to shoot an exterior freehand, but that limited when I could shoot to sunny parts of the day (the least best light) and it was very hard to frame the shot exactly right (especially when bracketing for exposure). This kind of shooting means fast shutter speeds. The money shot that my art director always wants, at dusk when the interior lights just match the level of the outdoor light, was out of the question shooting freehand, high up in a tree.

A colleauge, Roe Osborn (www.capecreative.com), gave me a great tip: duct tape your tripod to a step ladder and then use another step ladder to climb on so that you won't shake the tripod. I can usually come up with a couple of step ladders between the homeowners, architect and builder. If not I can rent or buy a couple from Home Depot (I return them for my money back the next day).

The photo above shows me taking Roe's advice, or at least partially, I was on a 16 foot step ladder (!) and the builder, Rich Elstrom didn't happen to have another (frankly, it's pretty stunning that he has one). As it turned out, I wasn't able to get quite enough elevation for the shot I wanted, and because I had to climb the same ladder that my tripod was duct taped to, it was difficult to keep the ladder steady for a long exposure. The next day, Rich's Foreman, Mark, rented me a cherry picker which got me plenty high for my money shot.

The shot ended up being reprinted in TIME Magazine's 2006 Design and Style Guide. The article can be seen at the architect, Nathan Good's, website.