How to Create Beautiful Baby Portraits Using Natural Light in Your Own Garage

If you don’t have a ton of fancy lighting gear at home, this doesn’t mean that you can’t produce gorgeous studio-style images. This in-depth video tutorial shows you how to get great results using minimal equipment from the comfort of your own garage and dives deep into how they're edited in Lightroom.

Coming to you from our friend, Pye Jirsa, with Adorama, this tutorial runs you through the process of creating a beautiful photograph of a baby from start to finish — all without using any strobes or giant softboxes. 

There are a few prerequisites, however. A backdrop will isolate your subject and tidy up the photograph dramatically, and Jirsa includes some tips if you don’t have a professional backdrop on hand. You might need to be creative when it comes to rigging the backdrop if you don’t have a C-stand and a load of clamps to hand; you could run a clothesline through your garage and pin it in place with a couple of clothes pegs, perhaps.

If you don’t have enough height from the backdrop, don’t worry; as long as you clear your baby’s head, it’s incredibly easy to expand a background during post-production in the event that you need to give your subject a bit more breathing space — something that Jirsa recommends.

Andy Day's picture

Andy Day is a British photographer and writer living in France. He began photographing parkour in 2003 and has been doing weird things in the city and elsewhere ever since. He's addicted to climbing and owns a fairly useless dog. He has an MA in Sociology & Photography which often makes him ponder what all of this really means.

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Very cute, I suspect that we'll see one of these from Lee in the future.