Friday, November 13, 2009 Amazing Seamless Shooting Tutorials
I’m the proud new owner of set of four Profoto lights, and spent the day today getting used to them. A very basic (but not as easy as you might think) challenge is lighting a white seamless perfectly, so that’s what I’ve spent some time today doing—making a white seamless evenly lit and perfectly white. Monitoring levels on the camera and getting it to 255 (the top of the levels scale) in-camera was the first step; taking that into Aperture and looking at it larger was second. To see how even it really is, all you have to do is crank the gamma way up, and your white seamless will show hot-spots pretty quickly. Here’s an early sample:
Looks pretty good, right?
The truth comes out! Not so even after all. Note what I’ve done with Levels to reveal the truth.So that tells me I have some work to do on positioning the lights. Of course unless I build a wall of light or shoot straight into a heavily diffused softbox, it’s unlikely I’d ever get it perfect when pushing levels to that extreme, but it’s a great way to get used to the tools and understand what’s really happening. Getting the background edge-to-edge clean within half a stop from center to edge seems a fair goal.
But I digress… that’s not the real reason I started this post. The real reason I am writing is to share an absolutely amazing set of blog-posts I stumbled on today (written last year). Atlanta-based photographer Zack Arias www.zarias.com has written a fantastic series of posts on working with a white seamless. Tomorrow morning I’m heading to Lowes Hardware to buy some white tileboard—you’ll have to read his blog to see why. These tutorials are educational, interesting, and damn funny. It’s a five part series, starting here: White Seamless Tutorial :: Part 1 :: Gear & Space
Reader Comments (3)
seems like you figured it out, but it is never really white with your subject in the shot. I have spent many hours in the studio, and always end up removing the bakcground if i need actual white anyway.
Thanks for the info, very informative
Tony,
I hate to disagree, but I disagree ;-) I have been able to get a pure white background. The key seems to be overexposing the background enough to ensure a total white, but not so much that it spills back onto the subject (too much). Zack's site suggests to go 1-1/2 stops over, and that seems to have worked. The larger the background the harder it is, no question. And I do have some work to do to get this better. But I'm there!
Joseph,
You're absolutely onto something here. You can go a long way to save yourself post-production work if you shoot correctly on set the first time. Increasing the distance between the subject and the background will help a lot. Using black cards, black 4x8's, black 12'x12' solids etc. will also be your best friends in this technique. I've shot this kind of thing for years, and it still surprises me how few photographers understand the basics. You're well on your way to better technique!
To take this a step further, if you have space, consider this: Separate your background as much as you can from your subject. You can essentially build two parts of the same set away from each other and use different lighting setups on each of them. Blow-out the background-set with lots of light, and use a different kind of lighting style on the foreground-set (ringlite, striplight, soft box, beauty light, etc.) If you're shooting a still life object on white seamless, or white plexiglas, instead of sweeping the curve of the background up towards the ceiling, sweep it downward to the floor. With you're eyes you'll notice a horizon line, but if you light the background-set correctly and blend that light with the light on the foreground-set, maybe choose a low shooting angle and throw the horizon out of focus. You can enlarge this set to a larger scale and shoot people, cars, motorcyles, etc on it. There are infinite possibilities that you can do with good lighting.
I have a few examples of shots I've done with this technique on my site if you need a clearer idea of how it works have a look: http://www.markviker.com
Good luck and keep learning about good lighting!
Mark