Should this be moved to the P&M forum instead of being in Showcase?
To answer your question: Approximately how much do you want to spend, and what size of models do you want to photograph?
At a minimum, if you want to take good, studio-looking photos, you need:
- SLR camera with manual focus and manual aperture
- Tripod
- Source of ample constant, cool ("daylight") lighting
- Some backdrop
- A table
The picture boxes that come in a kit are pretty much junk,
IMO. Most of them come with lights that are not really bright enough, and that are too warm (yellow) to take a nice model photo.
I would simply use a piece of colored cloth from the fabric store as the backdrop (this is really cheap, a few dollars).
For lights, if you are on a very limited budget, use 3 or so articulating floor or desk lamps with 100W daylight bulbs. If you are willing to spend $75 or so, you can get a pair of tripods with light heads that take dual bulbs (so 4 bulbs in total), and populate those with either regular lightbulbs or photography ones (they go up to around 300W each). If you want to spend even more, pros use LED light panels with barn doors now, that cost anywhere from $100 to thousands of dollars each.
You absolutely need a tripod.
You want a digital camera, ideally with a remote trigger, because pressing the trigger will shake the camera. Alternatively, you can use the self portrait timer. Either way, you want to manually focus on your subject, and set your aperture high (f11 or more), because this keeps more of the subject in focus. Not setting the aperture high enough is why you see some models with a head in focus, a sword out of focus, and a foot that's blurry.
Where you put the lights are very important too. In a professional photography studio, you'd typically want lights hitting the subject, one higher than the other on opposite diagonal sides, and some lighting directly in front. You want to cast shadows, but not excessive ones, and you want them to be nice shadows -- and there is an art to that. My best advice is to play around with it
Oh, back on the backdrop for a moment. There are two ways of doing this. You can either put the backdrop that you want (think portrait photographer who puts a patterned backdrop behind you), or go chroma (think green screen) and remove it in photoshop later and place whatever pattern you want. The latter is really superior. But the problem is, in order to achieve it, you need to avoid shadows onto your backdrop, and to do that, you need a light source to illuminate the backdrop, without illuminating your subject (eg narrow angle spot lights pointed at the backdrop, with enough space between the backdrop and the subject). It's a little tricky, and more to the point, requires quite a bit of space, and a really good backdrop -- so I wouldn't recommend it.
There are MANY books and websites on the subject, by the way. It's just "product photography", and in the hobby, we're trying to do the best we can with as little as possible
