White Seamless, Glass, Props, Reflections, Oh My!
Finished up a very cool portrait shoot last week, and wanted to show everyone how I did it. Nola Aitken is a University of Lethbridge staff member and her research focuses around testing methods and academic evaluation. We decided to make a super-sized “test” and shoot Nola “through” it. We sourced a piece of glass, created a couple test questions and had vinyl decals made to apply them to the glass. After we had our test created, I had to figure out how to make it all come together. I actually diagrammed my ideas because I was that worried about it!
SO. You can see what I have planned. We’re shooting on white seamless (so that we’ll be able to see the black letters). As for lighting, I’m using an AB800 in a gridded Octa overhead and on-axis. Two gridded Speedlights for hair/rim lights, and one AB800 to blow the seamless out. As for “grip” I realized I didn’t have the gear to suspend the pane of glass up where we needed it to be, so we went low-tech. We put it on two chairs, had Nola kneel, and I had an assistant hold the pane of glass upright. Since we’re cropping at waist level, the final image shouldn’t give it away that she was on her knees.
Now reality is always a bit different than planning, and I made a few changes when I got to the studio to shoot. I left lots of setup time to troubleshoot (I was SO worried about reflections). Here’s what we ended up with:
First Change- I hung the light for the seamless off of one of the motorized electrics, and built a large softbox, but didn’t put any diffusion panels in it. Just for generally shaping the light. That works better than the standard reflector because it better matches the shape of the background. Second- Didn’t need a flag for the key- the Octa ended up at a steep enough angle that I didn’t get any reflection off of the glass. Modeling lights can be really useful for checking for reflections for things like this. Kept everything else the same as what I drew, other than the lens. 70mm was enough, so I shot my 24-70 2.8. The setup up-top looked like this:
And from the side, so you can see the softbox/background light-
Straight out of the camera I got this:
And after a quick edit, we ended up with this final frame, which I’m quite proud of:
Final settings were ISO200, 200th, F9, 60mm. More to come!
One Response to “White Seamless, Glass, Props, Reflections, Oh My!”
[...] up a seamless- Two are always preferable, Or, you can use a softbox with no diffusion like when I shot Nola Aitken. In this case, my softbox was tied-up as a fill-light. Here’s one of the final shots we got [...]