In November I did a shoot to promote a new student night in York called Tequila. Amonst other things the images were going to be displayed on a large plasma screen in the venue so I wanted them to carry maximum impact so went with a bold white background look. I was uploading a few of these images to flickr and thought I’d write a short post about how I set up the shots.

Zack Arias has a written very good set of tutorials on working with seamless backgrounds in this way. The background is lit separately from the subject to make it easier to get the exposures right and to “blow out” the background (make it show up pure white in the camera). Gobos (go betweens) are used to stop background light hitting the subject:

It is stated that three lights is basically a minimum for this (two for the background, one for the subject) however it’s not an absolute necessity as we shall see…

The mark of a good photographer is being flexible and overcoming whatever deficiencies you are faced with, such as the case with this shoot when only two strobes were available.

I did have a seamless white background however it doesn’t matter if you only have a white/pale wall, the principals are the same. The main light is rather boring, a softbox above the camera (I needed something that was going to work with lots of movement). Lighting the background from one side is going to give uneven illumination making it very hard to blow out, however it is possible to light the entire background using one light if it’s placed directly behind the subject, like so:

Most strobes will put out a beam wide enough to light a 10′ background like this. So why do Zack (and others) recommend two lights for the background? As you might have guessed in most cases the subject is not going block the light completely due to the wide base of the lightstand, which we’ll see when this approach is used in practice (replace the beach ball with blonde models as appropriate):

The models aren’t centred on the background (I felt it was more important to keep the shoot flowing than constantly ask people to move) however the stand is still visible and this is something that can only really be fixed in post. However it turns out to be a very simple Photoshop job, due to the fact we’re only drawing in a white background.

It can be done with straight lines, by creating a selection using the polygonal lasso tool (in pretty much any version of Photoshop/PSP/GIMP).

The area is then filled white using the rectangle tool. The edges of the background are similarly extended using the rectangle tool, yielding the cleaned up image:

Total time taken for the above, slightly less than 30 seconds. Photoshop is a tool for photographers, just like autofocus or metering or flash lighting, it doesn’t make you a bad person. In this case 30 seconds of post production could have saved you a third of your lighting budget! Depending on how many images you have to produce this may or not make sense, but it’s an option.

Following the post production theme, adjustments of brightness, contrast and colour balance, and a touch of soft focus yields the final image (above). The effect is stronger than I’d use in most cases but it fits the purpose of the set. You can view some more of images from the shoot here.

MG

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 at 9:35 pm and is filed under Behind the Scenes, Tutorials and guides. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.