All white seamless background: lessons learned

It was probably almost a month ago now that I had the time and energy (at least I thought) to try and attempt Zach Arias’s all white seamless background tutorial.  I love the effect and I wanted one more trick to add to my bag, and surely something as stylized and simple looking as this would be a great addition.  I should have realized this wasn’t on sure footing when I came down with a fever.

I’m not going to reteach Zach’s tutorial because he quite frankly does a good job of it already.  However, I will share some things I learned that might keep you from either wasting time or going down a dead end road.  In the end I was only able to come out with two images, neither of which are portfolio worthy in any aspect.  But it was a learning experience and it wasn’t a costly one.  I’ll gladly take that anytime.  Let’s a look at somet things you might want to be aware of:

This is how I felt during this whole process.

Space

This should primarily be your first concern.  This is the only variable that you may not be able to change.  I don’t have access to an area with large ceilings and a spacious floor or this would have been a lot easier.  I have a meager 12×9 or so small living room with 8′ ceilings that also houses such things as furniture and the necessary audio/visual equipment needed to watch the likes of ’24′.  I ended up using a small 4 to 5 foot strip of area in the living room that was available that opened up into the dining room/kitchen area.  I would set everything up in the living room then shoot from kitchen.  It was the only way I could make it work.

I greatly hated this setup.  I didn’t have floor space to back up far enough to do full body shots, so I was limited to head shots, maybe two thirds shots.  The reason being, as Zach points out in his tutorial, you have to be so far away from the background to keep from getting bad light spill on your subject because since the background is two stops overexposed, it basically becomes a light source.  If you get to close, it starts to contribute to lighting your subject and that can, in most circumstances, mess things up.   And since I was limited to only doing at best two thirds shots, this seamless setup is overkill because I’m not utlizing the seamless floor, which is the whole point of doing this.  I could get the same results by just hanging the paper down with nothing on the floor.

So, if you don’t have the space to properly give enough room for your subject to stand away from the background, don’t bother with this.  It’s unneccesary.  Sadly, it may take you actually going through the whole process of setting it all up to see discover that it won’t work.  Bummer.

Materials

I’m going to give one heads up on this before I say anything else: if you’re going to do full length body shots, don’t skimp on the paper width.  See the picture below:

Please disregard my goofy siting pose.  I had a fever.  Anyways, do you see the problem already?  I had paper that was 4 1/2 ft. wide with tileboard that was cut to the same width.  Because of that, anywhere that light didn’t hit the background and get blown out created a reflection that came right back down onto the tileboard as dark light.  So the all white turns somewhat white and somewhat dark.  No good.  You need your paper width to be somewhere around 9 ft, as Zach uses in his tutorial, simply to keep this from happening.

Also, take notice: I set this all up on a DIY PVC background and it was pretty frustrating.  This could have been alleviated if I had someone else there to help put it together.  If you have someone else to help, it’s a cheap alternative.  I keep mine an old B&H box so its portable.  But if someone is not there to help me put it together, it’s going to cause some headaches.  I tried to lay it down and put together, then stand it up, but my living room wasn’t large enough to allow that.   So I had to put one side together and then put the same piece on the other side walking the whole thing up… nevermind.  If you try it by yourself, you’ll soon see what I’m blabbing about.  Do yourself a favor and get someone to help you assemble it.

Macro photography

So, in the end, I discovered that my living room isn’t big enough to do full length shots.  However, this setup could be used (and is used by many) for macro photography.  The benefits to that is that you could use a smaller and more manageable setup, but the same principles apply, just on a smaller scale.  And that’s what we see in this picture:

Be aware though, that there are some limitations, namely with the width of the paper as seen in the picture shown ealier, as well in this:

As you can see, you still have to be aware of the dark spots that can appear off on the sides.  But thankfully as Zach pointed out in his tutorial, a little Photoshop cropping and you’re good to go.  Just be aware that your subject(s) aren’t in that area of the setup.

One more thing to consider too, just as you would with a person, remember to consider light spill and what your key light is doing regardless of the background.  A poorly lit subject will still look poorly lit even against an all white seamless background.  I took these just to see what the two lights (key and background) were doing seperate from one another:

As you can see, I’ve got no wrap around light on Nuts that is obstrusive enough to worry about.  However, he is underexposed using the key light.  I didn’t catch it because I wasn’t paying attention enough (again I blame the fever) so I had to bump him up a little Photoshop to compensate.  You’ll probably want to get it right off the bat, that’s why this helped me see that I could potentially overlook it if I’m not aware of what my light is doing.

I hope this may show you some things to consider before you attempt this.  It really is cool but space and materials are defintely important, the former more than anything else.  But if you can do it, I’d recommend it.  It was fun educational and I hope I can find some place large enough to allow me to photograph people full length.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 at 12:15 pm. It is filed under Flash, Gear, Photography and tagged with background, DIY, Flash, jacob vorpahl, lessons learned, Photography, Photos, seamless, strobist, tutorial, white, zach arias. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.