If you ever rented out a simple white wall photo studio that happened to have only white color backdrop, and for some reason you need to shoot a model against black background, how will you make it work? In this episode with AdoramaTV and Mark Wallace we explore a pretty neat method of making and bight surface/background complete black.

Mark shares his technique: “We have  one single light, and we’re not going to  do any fancy lighting setups or anything, but we’re going to look  at the principle of controlling our  light, and our light fall-off, and learn  how we can illuminate the model on a white  wall, but get even a punch to your image  by illuminating her a different way.  So that white wall becomes a gradient, it  goes to black with a smidge of white.”

“First I’m going to set up our basic  lighting setup as I normally would, on a  normal background, and so what we have  here is we’ve had this Profoto two-foot  Octa box, and it is just a little bit  less than a 45 degree angle to the side,  and so you notice this softbox is  illuminating Maria, but it’s also  illuminating this white background. That means this is going to show up in our  exposure. “

“You can see that we have a  white background, and a sort of a nasty  shadow, but that’s what we would expect  with a white wall, a white background.  How do we get that white background to go  from white to black, and the answer is  simply, we just need to not illuminate it.  So the reason this white background is  white remember is, because light is  hitting this wall.  So if we remove the light,  we will make this a dark background.  So just to really illustrate this,  what I’m going to do is, I’m going  to take my PocketWizard off,  which means that the flash is not  going to fire.  I’m going to take another photo,  I’m an ISO 100 f/8, and 1/80th of a second,  so look right at me Maria, so I’m at the  same exact place I was before.  I’m gonna take a picture  with no flash, and that is a completely  black image, which means the only light  that’s hitting that back wall is the  light from this flash.”

“None of the light here in the studio is  doing anything to that white wall.  It is just aren’t bright enough to make  a proper exposure at f/8 ISO 100 and  1/180th of a second.  The only light that the camera sees is the  light from the flash,  and if this light from the flash is  hitting our white wall, our white wall is  gonna be white.  So how do we fix that? It’s quite simple we just need to move  the flash, and that’s what we’re gonna do next.”

“Now we’ve moved our single light  off axis we’re almost at a 90 degree  angle of this softbox, and so it’s  not facing the back wall.  It is at a 90 degree angle from where my camera’s  gonna be, so light, it’s gonna be  falling on Maria, it’s not gonna be  falling on this black wall.  It’s black because there’s no light,  there might be some light falling over  here, because of the spread, so if we zip  on to the other side you can sort of see  how we’re controlling that.”

“So this softbox has a grid on it, this  grid controls the spread of light, so as  it’s coming out, it’s not hitting this  white wall.  It might hit right back here,  which would be a cool effect, because  this is going to be a lighter portion of  this wall than this.  It’ll go from black, to a little bit white and  that’ll be really cool, so now that we have  things set up.”

“I love  these images, and it was really simple to  do, we just added a grid, we moved the  light to this side, we controlled the  fall-off of that line, made sure that the  light didn’t get to the white wall,  except when we wanted it to, and so we  got a really cool gradient contrasty  profile shot, which I absolutely love.”

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Watch the full episode with Mark Wallace and Adorama TV: