How to shoot great one-light portraits in a tiny home studio

Learning to shoot portraits at home is often a struggle. Even when you can convince one of your family members to hop in front of the camera so you can experiment and blast lights at them, you’re often constrained by space. It’s a home. It’s filled with furniture. Even if you can move it out of the way for a couple of hours, you usually don’t get a lot of room to set up and shoot.

In this video, though, Jiggie Alejandrino walks us through his journey, setting up some fantastic portrait lighting in his tiny home studio. Keeping the small space in mind, Jiggie only uses a single light for the setups in this video. But it’s more than just another “here’s how to light a subject with one light” video.

One of the great things I liked about this video is that Jiggie doesn’t just jump right into it, demonstrating a setup and “Well, there you go, that’s how you do it!”. In fact, he spends the entire first half of the video (about 10 minutes) just talking over the theory and the gear, so you can understand the mindset of picking each piece of equipment and how they all fit into the overall plan. We also get a lot of great workflow tips to make your cramped shooting life a little easier.

Jiggie goes into a lot of detail in this one and offers some great insight into planning and prepping your home studio shoot. A lot of the tips can also be applied to those looking to shoot portraits on location, too, whether that be somebody else’s home, their office, or wherever you might one day find yourself limited on space for a shoot.