Kristin wanted to give her parents new pictures for Christmas. This made me excited because I was wanting to try a new trick. Creating a seamless white background…without a seamless white background.
The idea is simple, throw-up a sheet, put a flash or two to shoot through from the back, and voilà. A seamless white.
Without a light:
With a light:
It was going good, but I only had one flash in my bag. Meaning I would be lighting the background, not her. We were doing this inside, and it was around 3:30, so ultimately I couldn’t get enough ambient to come through the windows to light her face properly. And I had to abandon the seamless white. But that’s how it goes sometimes. To save the shoot, I asked her if close-in head shots were fine.
During Plan A, I taped a 6′ by 5′ white muslin (as seen above). By shining a flash through the back it became perfect white. But without the flash, it looked like an ugly sheet.
I moved my light around to light her face (put an umbrella on it to soften it up). Since I was in relatively low light, I was able to use a pretty wide aperture (f/3.2), which blurred out my background, which was still up.
I played around with some CTO (color temperature orange) gels to get an even color light. And as a bonus, I was able to get the “blue” background by using CTOs and shifting the color temp back to white.
Here are the two finals:
In all of this, I had one other problem. I was using the cheap, chinese-made, eBay triggers (about $50, total) to fire my flash off-camera. I’ve heard these can be very unreliable but hadn’t had many issues myself.
Until now.
It got to the point where only one in every four or five shots would actually fire the flash. I was getting kind of depressed. I thought it might have been the batteries, but the manual-fire function worked each time. But alas, we pressed on and finally made it through.
Update: I have since acquired some RadioPopper JrX’s. These are awesome; I’ve been playing with them a lot. Very affordable, as good quality triggers go. And, of course, excellent quality. If you want to do off camera lighting on a budget, these are invaluable.