Now that we’ve established the potential pitfalls of fluorescent lighting, it was now my ambition to see if I could build an off-the-shelf lighting system using parts from Home Depot. In some ways I was successful, and in others I faced some intersting limitations.
Knowing that the end goal is shooting some of the food we cook for my wife’s site The Fashionable Foodie, I decided that I would set a few parameters before shopping. Since we’re both new at this, I wanted to minimize as many variables as possible. We have very little experience plating, styling, photographing, lighting and setting scenery, so I thought it would be best to cut out table settings entirely. I decided to begin by building a table-top cyclorama to shoot all the subjects on a plain white background for simplicity’s sake.