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…

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