How to Set Up a Basic Photo Studio at Home Using Only One Light

Filipino portrait and wedding photographer Jiggie Alejandrino recently released a great beginner’s guide to creating a basic photography studio at home. In the video, he shows you how you can set yourself up to take beautiful portraits using just one light, a 5-in-1 reflector, and not much else.

The setup itself is extremely simple, and can be done even if you don’t have the nice light stand and reflector holder that Alejandrino is using. He’s simply using a single speedlight, and shooting it through the diffusion material that makes up the innermost layer of the 5-in-1 reflector.

The reflection material that was unzipped off of the reflector is then used as needed to create fill.

Once he covers the gear used, Alejandrino shows you three, simple but distinct lighting setups that you can do using just this gear: clamshell lighting for “standard” beauty portraits, short lighting for a very dramatic look, and a trick for capturing a clean (ish) white background using only one light, without overexposing your subject in the process.

This is as basic as a one-light setup gets, but as Alejandrino shows, you can still capture some beautiful images using just this. And if you can afford to throw another light into the mix, you can really start to experiment by lighting the background, adding a hair light, and more.

Check out the full video up top to see how each setup is done, and if you have any other suggestions for building a basic home studio, drop them in the comments down below.