As I began to piece together my "studio" in chicago, I found myself greatly satisfied at how much one can accomplish at very little expense. The photos I post are prepared with skill and great care, however, I am not using a professional studio or thousands of dollars of specialized equipment.
The beauty of digital photography is the process is greatly simplified from the convultion that is film. The lab, the processing, the printing are all consolidated to a home computer. White balancing film is difficult and expensive. It requires special equipment, high temperature resin gels and filters. With digital you can manually white balance to literally any continous spectrum light source - especially shooting in .RAW. This makes it possible to use a $5 worklight from the hardware store for shooting. Tungsten studio lights, on the other hand, cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Are there drawbacks? of course.
My backdrop is a $.50 piece of white poster board supported by a cardboard box I got for free.
I used to spend a lot of time searching for nice photo plates. A high end restaurant will easily spend $40 or more on a single service piece. Most of the time I erase the plate anyway in post, for one reason or another. So instead, a 12x12 white square of plexiglass ($2) stands in for bernadaud china.
There is no way around the cost of a camera and adobe photoshop. I shoot on a canon rebel xsi. However - before switching to a digital slr, I used a canon powershot that cost approx. $300 for years. These were difficult shoots because of the limitations of the camera. My point is that it is possible to create a high quality image without a prosumer digital camera.
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