5000K LED Light Wall

sitter

January 4, 2022

Hello from your friendly neighborhood light and airy photographer! Usually my blog is a place for clients (past and potential!) to check out my work! Today, however, I’m writing a post for other photographers. See, this past weekend, a dream of mine was realized – my husband built me an LED light wall in my basement photography studio – and I Am In Heaven! This LED light wall will be instrumental in backlighting my newborn family photos, my sitter sessions, my cake smash sessions – really, any indoor session that I have in my studio. I *may* even begin offering studio maternity sessions 😍🙏🏼

This is a dream I’ve had for a long time but I started trying to put it into practice this past July. Thanks to Covid and its supply chain disruption, I had to wait until December until I actually received the lights but we finally got them and installed them this weekend! So. Happy.

Being a light and airy photographer, dreamy, light-filled images make my soul sigh. However, my photography studio is in the basement of my home…and my home is surrounded by 10 acres of densely packed trees…which means that light is not exactly pouring in except between 10-11 am on your random sunny winter morning. In the middle of the summer, I’m up a creek.

That’s where my LED light wall comes in. It’s daytime all the time down there now and I’m thrilled. I can do a session in the morning. I can do a session in the evening. I can do a session in the middle of the night if I wanted to (I don’t). Thanks to my dreamy, sheer curtain covered LED light wall, it’s always a sunny day in Burtonsville and now I can achieve the gorgeous backlit images that I’ve been coveting for years.

So. I thought if I was wanting a fabulous LED light wall for my studio, surely there are others like me and maybe a blog post would be helpful to someone who was wondering how to get started! And here we are.

After a lot of consideration of how we would do this project, we decided against building a rolling wood frame – which would be huge, expensive, and take up a lot of space. Instead, we decided to suspend the LED panels from heavy-duty wire anchored by a screw into the wood frame under the drywall and take our chances (j/k, it’s extremely sturdy…no chances taken here).

We took a trip to Home Depot to gather our supplies:

The lights were purchased from Sunco. I bought six 50 watt 2’x4′ LED ceiling panels with a Kelvin rating of 5000K Daylight. I did a series of hyperlapse videos that I posed to instagram. Those can be viewed here. The total cost of this project was $646.02 ($434.71 for the LED panels, $211.31 for the Home Depot supplies).

I have yet to shoot a session with this glorious LED light wall – yesterday’s snowstorm required some rescheduling of the cake smash sessions I had for Monday and Tuesday – but as soon as I have some in-use photos to share, you better believe I will!

Liz Viernes Photography is based near Annapolis, Maryland, and specializes in maternity, fresh 48, posed and lifestyle newborns and first year milestone portraits.

Come follow along on Facebook and Instagram, and the Blog!

leave a comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *