Background stands

Background stands, amazingly enough, hold
up your backgrounds. Most background
stand kits have three pieces: two stands and
a cross-bar. The cross-bar slides into a roll of
paper or other backdrop and is held up by
the stands. The cross-bar has two holes, one
at either end, which slide over a support pin
on the top of the stand. The crossbar is usu-
ally adjustable from 3 to 121⁄2feet, to accom-
modate the various widths of backdrops. The
stands are adjustable in height up to 101⁄2
feet. Most kits also come with either a carry-
ing case or a bag for maximum portability.
There a varying degrees of quality in back-
ground stands. The more sturdy the stand,
the more expensive it is. For a portable stu-
dio, a decent medium-weight background
stand kit suffices.
Space Requirements
Portable studios, by their very nature, don’t
require a lot of space to set up. As always,
the more space you have, the more com-
fortable you are.
If your portable studio is going to be set up
mostly in one place, such as a spare room in
your house, then you’re going to want to
take measurements of the width of the
space to make determinations, such as how
wide your backdrop can be. Another consid-
eration is what type of photography you
plan to do. If you’re going to be photo-
graphing full length portraits, for example,
the length of the room needs to be longer
than if you’re planning on photographing
mainly head and shoulders portraits.

Setting up indoors

The first thing you want to do when setting
up indoors is to find a space wide enough
to accommodate your background and
stands. Remember that although your back-
drop may only be six feet wide, the stands
extend two or three feet beyond that. Next,
you want to be sure that you have enough
room in front of the background to be able
to move back and forth to enable you to
compose your picture properly.
Depending on the type of indoor photogra-
phy you are planning, your considerations
differ, as the next sections explain.

Portraits

When photographing portraits, you want to
use lenses with a longer focal length so you
don’t get the distortion that wide angle
lenses often have. Unfortunately, with
longer lenses comes the need for more
space.
Chapter 5 ✦Setting Up a Wireless Studio 95
5.7 A background stand kit with seamless
paper backgrounds
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