How to Take Better Portraits… Put Your Clients in a Box

They love it!

I’ll show you how to do this in clients own homes…

This isn’t a unique concept, but it’s one that very few, if any, clients have seen & they love it

To set this up in a clients home, I have made a flat pack box out of 18mm MDF which enables me to get it in the car, and I then assemble it on site. In fact I have two boxes – the one I’ve used above which is 120cm square by 60cm deep which I use for family shoots. The second is 120cm high by 80cm wide by 45cm deep which I use for individual children or siblings.

The lighting set up is very simple – I use one light with a 7′ umbrella – I use a  Walimex Pro umbrella that is about £80 off Amazon. For an extra £30 or £40, you can get a cover that goes over it to make a massive soft box

The lighting diagram looks like this – click for a larger view

I set the box up & put the camera on a tripod so that I can crop one image down to the box in Lightroom & then synchronise the crop across all the images. To achieve the leg dangling into the box below effect you need to set the box up raised off the ground about 60cm and add a “skirt” so that you can cut out the trailing leg in Photoshop.

To achieve the “rope pulling” effect I create two shots & then stitch them together in Photoshop