Thoughts on High-Key Photos

seeker

Most of my portrait work (which is very sparse) has been done with a black velveteen-type background. I decided recently, however, that I wanted to give High Key photography a try.

I purchased a white cloth for a background, and have been playing around with different lighting set ups. I have three strobes, all fitted with 24x32" softboxes.

I can't seem to get the right balance between the background and the subject. In order to make the creases/wrinkles in the material invisible, and in order to get a white rather than "muddy" looking background, I almost have to "blow out" the backround by setting my lights to a very high power setting.

This is not really what I am looking for at all, as the background seems to "glow" at this point. When I drop the power settings on the two background lights, then I no longer have a pure white background.

Anyone have any experience with this sort of thing?

Thanks!

Brian

LiquidAir

I have a white muslin backdrop and the wrinkles are a problem. I don't have enough space to put it far enough behind my subject to sufficiently blur the wrinkles. I am plannig on ironing mine...

Any light hitting the backdrop at an angle will emphasize the wrinkles. The best strategy I have found so far is to place light behind the backdrop pointing toward the camera; essentially turning the backdrop into a huge softbox.

Scott_Quier

seeker wrote:

I can't seem to get the right balance between the background and the subject. In order to make the creases/wrinkles in the material invisible, and in order to get a white rather than "muddy" looking background, I almost have to "blow out" the backround by setting my lights to a very high power setting.

Thanks!

Brian

It would seem to me that you need to handle this much the same as you would for sunlite snow and adjust your EC a bit.

If I remember correctly, if you take a reflectance exposure reading of both your subject and your backdrop, you should be looking for about 1.5 or 2.5 stops difference. What may be happening to you, when you get the muddy backgrounds, is that the camera is attempting to intrepret the background as 18% gray and setting the exposure accordingly.

When all is said and done, your histogram should give you a clue with a sharp spike at or very near the right side. This would be your background.

bsvirginian

I think that if you have your background lights about 2 stops hotter than the main you shouldn't have any problems. I would place my two lights (with out the softboxes) at about 90 degrees to the background. Your aperature might be too great if wrinkles are a problem. Try f5.6 or so. BS

System

I'm having good results (granted I'm about as new as you can get to this studio lighting stuff) using Arctic White paper from Calumet lit with a strobe using only a backlight shield to prevent any light from bleeding forward. Seems 2 stops hotter than the main lights is about right. I'd ditch the softbox on whatever strobe you're using for the backlight. The paper background makes it wasy to avoid any unwanted shadows in the blownout background. Light fall off at the edges is easily masked out in PS so just worry about the background lighting in the area close to the edges of your subject.

seeker

Success!
Thanks to all of you for your responses!

I figured that the best way to get rid of the wrinkles on the muslin background was to get rid of the muslin background

I returned it (yeah for Penn Camera, where I have 14 days to try things out!) and purchased a roll of white paper instead. I found almost instant success - almost instant because apparently my camera does not sync at 1/250 sec as I thought, but rather at 1/200.

Here is a sample of a series of images I took against the white paper, where I eventually learned of my shutter speed problem.

Photo #1 - subject standing too close to the background; picking up spill from the two background lights



Photo #2 - subject far enough away from background, but using 1/250 sec shutter speed (notice blue tint along left side of photo)



Photo #3 - used 1/320 sec shutter speed by mistake; notice the dark band down the left side finally cluing me into what the problem was



photo #4 - used a shutter speed of 1/200 sec, with subject the correct distance from the background. Success!

dogwood

A much, much easier method is this (esp. if you're just shooting 3/4 or headshots):

Take your white sheet and stretch it out on a background stand. Use two softboxes behind the sheet. Your subject still goes in front of the sheet. Voila-- instant white background. You can also use a softbox as your "white background". That's what I did here (single softbox as key too):

DRabbit

There's also a quick way in post-processing to get rid of the wrinkles.

Mask around the subject (doesn't have to be perfect) so that the background is selected. Then using levels go and set your white point to the darkest wrinkle.

Voila, no more wrinkles.