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: