The kit includes a photography background and all the necessary studio accessories, allowing for easy setup in home, office, school or studio environments. The simple configuration will be suitable for beginner photographers.

The Academy™ kit has been prepared for users based on the requirements set out for a home photo studio. It includes all the essential elements needed to build a photography studio at home - a background hanging system, basic background and lighting. The white background meets the requirements specified by authorities (photos for documents) as well as sales websites (product photography). The lighting power allows for photography ranging from close-ups (portrait, detail) to half-close-ups (bust shot). For inanimate nature, the frame is limited only by the width of the background. The kit can also be used for filming (live, stream, remote learning). In this case, higher sensitivities are required.

The Academy™ photography studio kit enables you to take photos:

• for documents (IDs, passports, student IDs, biometric photos)
• portrait (for documents, makeup, artistic portrait)
• product (catalogs, websites, online stores, sales platforms)
• for the Allegro website (auctions, buy now, thumbnails)

The lighting used in this kit is innovative studio continuous lighting - single-bulb LED lamps on lighting stands with photographic umbrellas serving as light modifiers. The lamps are equipped with DaVinci^™ photographic bulbs with standardized parameters (color temperature 3600-6200K and color rendering index CRI >90). Using continuous light in a home studio provides an excellent real-time view of the results, allows for working with smartphones, and importantly - enables filming. The use of umbrellas softens the tonal transition between light and shadow.

A minimum of 2 lamps is used in the Academy™ kits due to mutual shadow compensation - one lamp serves as the main light, while the other acts as a fill light. The power of the bulbs used is specified in the technical specifications (below).

The strong point of this kit is the lighting with remote brightness and color temperature control. Here, innovative LED Bi-Color bulbs from the DaVinci™ series are used, controlled remotely via included remotes.

Variable color temperature is achieved in the bulb using a classic method known from on-camera lights - by mounting a chessboard of luminescent diodes with two different color temperatures. This solution has an additional advantage: shifts in the spectrum of individual diodes increase effective color rendering for the entire bulb. The range of color temperatures goes from 3600K to 6200K. High luminous efficiency means that at low active power consumption, we achieve very high luminance comparable to 100-watt bulbs.

The LED matrices are covered with a protective diffuser dispersing the light over an area of 112cm², ensuring that emitted light has a pleasant, soft distribution regardless of intensity. At short distances, the softening of light can match that of a softbox or beauty-dish lamp. The bulb produces very nice, relatively large reflections.

The generated light is continuous without flickering, enabling filming with higher frame rates. The bulb is designed for indoor use, with an IP20 protection class. It is intended for professional applications in a photography studio environment. This bulb is not suitable for home use. The bulb housing is not hermetically sealed.

A lightweight, single-layer umbrella with a diameter of 110 cm and a silver reflector. The silver reflective layer does not change the color temperature of reflected light. The outer layer does not reflect light.
Umbrellas are used by professionals and amateurs alike. The function of an umbrella is to change the direction of incident light rays. The spherical shape of the reflector acts like a lens, changing the omnidirectional nature of the light into more parallel beams. This also increases the overall amount of light falling on the photographed object. In practice, this means that sharp shadows become softer, shapes are more plastic and "three-dimensional," textures are emphasized but not sharpened. With umbrellas, we can eliminate unwanted shadows while making tonal transitions much smoother. For portraits, skin tone looks better, wrinkles are reduced, and the iris is larger and brighter. In product photography, details in shadows are enhanced, areas of overexposure (glare) on shiny surfaces are reduced. This is also an ideal solution for people creating videos for their online channels.

A lightweight and stable stand designed for use with small and medium lamps as well as lighting kits in studio and outdoor environments. It works perfectly with flash lights and continuous light, softboxes, RedHead halogen lamps, whose easy mounting is facilitated by the 16mm studio head with a universal 1/4" thread. When folded, the stand takes up little space, and its assembly is extremely simple - it has convenient, profiled section clamps. The maximum height of the stand after unfolding is 200cm, while the working height is 190cm.

A professional lighting fixture allows for precise positioning of the light source on the photographed object. The fixture is made from lightweight and durable material. It is designed for continuous light bulbs and compact flash lamps with an E27 thread, as well as lighting stands with a 16mm end. Thanks to the wide range of head adjustments in the +80°/-80° range, it allows you to easily and conveniently change the light setting. At the back of the fixture is a two-wire cable 1.3m long.

The light sources used in the Academy™ kit allow for smooth color temperature adjustment. This provides a wide range of possibilities to match existing lighting conditions, create moods consistent with the presented theme, and conduct creative experiments using lights with different color temperatures.

There are various reasons why we use color temperature adjustments. One of the most commonly cited reasons is the use of ambient light - this could be daylight coming through a window or artificial light from lamps on the ceiling of the room. If we use bulbs with different color temperatures, it will be visible in the resulting frame and importantly - prevent us from achieving natural (neutral) white, gray, and skin tones. To counteract this, we adjust the temperature of the lamps to match that of the ambient lighting or sunlight (warm on sunny days, cool on cloudy ones). In this way, existing light improves exposure without affecting our "white balance" - the equilibrium of color temperatures in the frame.

Another reason why we might want to change the color temperature is to emphasize skin tone. People involved with makeup know that it can look different indoors and outdoors. By adjusting the color temperature of the lighting, we can check makeup in various situations. When taking photos or recording videos, we can enhance the effect we're aiming for - warming up skin tones or cooling them down for people with darker complexions and yellow hair.

The background hanging kit consists of two CGLS-816B studio stands and a foldable dual-section beam attached to them. The frame allows for the suspension of various photographic backgrounds (cardboard, vinyl or fabric) up to 5 kg in weight and with a maximum width of 165 cm. Backgrounds can be hung at heights ranging from 83 cm to 205 cm.
The beam is attached to the stands using butterfly nuts, which prevents it from lifting when raising the background upwards. Unrolling the background from the roll is blocked by inserting two grips (frogs) included in the kit.

A lightweight and economical photographic background made from polypropylene fabric ensures high durability and resistance to studio conditions - spills, creases, tears. The cardboard roll protects against creases during transport or storage. Potential creases can be easily removed by steaming the background or weighting it when wet.

The width and length of the fabric on the roll is sufficient for creating an entire background without creases (cyclorama) to photograph a silhouette. The perforated texture of the background minimizes reflections from strong light sources.

Note regarding material texture - people who are new to polypropylene photographic backgrounds may worry that the background's texture will be visible in photos. In real-life conditions, objects remain about 50 cm away from the background, which combined with shallow depth of field causes the background texture to become blurred.

We sell the background with a tube – this greatly facilitates work, transport and storage.

Material Texture

Note regarding material texture - people who are new to polypropylene photographic backgrounds may worry that the background's texture will be visible in photos. In real-life conditions, objects remain about 50 cm away from the background, which combined with shallow depth of field causes the background texture to become blurred. Using an aperture below 8 ensures that the background texture is not noticeable.

Choosing Lighting Power

When selecting lighting for a photography studio, it's important to ensure the right amount of light is available for your intended use. The Home Photography Studio kits may contain (depending on the version) from 2 to 16 bulbs.

• Inanimate objects don't require strong light.
  If you're photographing an object that isn't a living being, you can freely use single-bulb lamps. In product photography, exposure time is arbitrary and can always be adjusted to ensure proper exposure. A tripod will come in handy.
• Be mindful of people (and animals).
  During the photography of people and animals, exposure time is limited. Especially when photographing children or active animals, a significantly larger amount of light is required. Single-bulb lamps will suffice at short distances (approx. 0.5 m).
• The wider the frame - the more bulbs.
  You can assume that for portraits you can use two single-bulb lamps. When photographing with a large close-up, the distance of the softbox from the face is small and provides proper exposure. Increasing the frame quickly requires an increase in lighting power.
• Fashion on live models.
  If you plan to photograph fashion with a model (male or female), choose kits with two or more four-bulb softboxes.