The best place to practice photography, if it's possible, is in your own home. However, with few of us having acres of space to roam around in our own property, you need to get good at utilizing the space you do have. In this video, learn creative lighting techniques with speedlights even in smaller spaces.
If you want to improve at both photography and lighting, there is no way around the need to practice. This can, however, be difficult if you don't have your own studio and models on tap. In this video, Jiggie Alejandrino walks you through some interesting lighting techniques using speedlights, all while being in a modest home studio. As you can see, where he is shooting is only a little bigger than the average room, so you could likely recreate this in your own home somewhere.
There is one other barrier that Alejandrino doesn't solve in this video, and that's the fact that his wife is an experienced model! This is overcome by doing what so many of us have had to do when learning though: self-portraits. Self-portraits are a great way to learn portraiture, but I found them the most useful when it came to practicing lighting. If you tether your camera to a laptop, or link your camera with Bluetooth to a tablet or phone as I did, you can easily control the settings and your pose without having to go back and forth to the camera's screen. I did this in a tiny spare bedroom regularly when I bought my first speedlights and it was a valuable experience.
Do you practice lighting or portraiture at home? Do you have any techniques you can share?
