The topic of this weeks post is shooting portraits indoors with a white background, I mean a grey background, I mean a black background…confusing?? OK let me explain.

This weeks post is a bit of a tutorial on studio flash photography. WAIT! Don’t run off simply because you don’t have a fancy studio to shoot in! Most of us don’t. The truth is, you don’t need a fancy studio to make some pretty fancy images. If you have even a single flash, you can do some pretty neat stuff with it as long as you can get it off the camera (more on that in another post). For now we’ll concentrate on the background.

These two images were taken this past week during an evening session with fellow photographer Nick Bicanic (you can check out Nick’s site here).

Both images were shot with exactly the same background! (click the images to enlarge them)

Do you believe it?? Well its true, and neither photo was adjusted in Photoshop!

If you have access to a white background (and by background I mean any piece of white material that you can hang up behind your subject) you actually have access to several different backgrounds ranging in shades from white to black.

Ok here’s the “HOW TO” part.

Let’s take a look at the two images separately. The first image (with the white background) was taken at ISO 200, with a shutter speed of 1/200 of a second. The aperture was set to f8. We used two lights for the shot. One was stuffed into a 30″x40″ soft box and positioned high and at about a 45 degree angle to the subject. A second light was shot directly onto the white backdrop to blow it out. Right, so far pretty basic stuff (if you have any questions about this type of set up please email them to me at qanda@sjr-photo.com).

The second image was shot with the same ISO and shutter speed as the first. This is where the magic starts. Imagine then with these ISO and shutter speed settings if you set your aperture at say f22 and pointed it at just about anything that was unlit and took a shot, what do you figure you would get? Right…BLACK! So rather than lighting the background we left it alone, set up two lights at 90 degrees to the subject (not necessary but in this case this was the type of lighting we were after, it gives a very sinister “I am going to take over the WORLD, MUAHAHAHAHA! look, but I digress) and adjusted the aperture to f22. The faint “rim” lighting you can see around my head and along my shoulders was courtesy of a Canon Speedlite 580EX II set on a light stand directly behind my head and VOILA! A perfectly black background shot off of white cloth.

Now let’s take a minute to determine WHY this works.

When we take a photo we are working with light. It is the single most important factor which influences our decisions about how we will make an image. The more light we allow into our scene the brighter the image will be, and conversely the less light we allow the darker it will be. The background in this case is no different. We are able to get sufficient lighting on the subject with strobes and flashes, but using the aperture we can control how “bright” the unlit background is.

Now, many of you will be saying to yourselves “well that would be great if I had access to more than just the one speedlite that I have in my bag” and to that I say this – shooting these images was a lot of fun mostly because I had another photographer to work with. So…call up some of your friends, invite them over, ask them to bring their gear and have some fun with it! That is what it is supposed to be about. Mess around, learn together, you will AMAZED and what will come out of it.

With that I wish to say a huge thanks to Nick for bring his gear over and for making it a fun evening!

As always you can leave questions and comments below or by email at qanda@sjr-photo.com. If you want to follow me on twitter you can just click the link in the sidebar and if you tweet questions using the hashtag #sjrqa I will be sure to answer them!

Until next time,

Thanks for reading!

SJR