If you have a good understanding of how light works, you may find that an expensive studio stuffed full of high-end strobes and funky diffusers is far from important when it comes to creating striking images. In this short video, photographer Irene Rudnyk shows you how to produce something remarkable using little more than a shed.

Natural light on a bright day can be brutal, producing harsh shadows across a model’s features. Using a doorway leading into a dark room can turn that hard light to soft, and Rudnyk here shows how the shed in her back garden gives her some very flattering illumination.

Squeezing her sister into the small shed in between a bottle of weedkiller and a turquoise mountain bike, Rudnyk demonstrates how easy it is to create such a simple setup. Incredibly generous when it comes to passing on her knowledge, Rudnyk even offers viewers an insight into the editing that she carries out on the shots taken on her medium format camera using Portra 400 film. You can see the before and after here, with Rudnyk explaining that she does little more than some light skin retouching, contrast, and a tweak to the white balance. 

What’s the strangest place you’ve ever turned into a photo studio? Leave your answer in the comments below.