White Seamless for Versatility.

A good friend of mine, and former ULSU President, Adam Vossepoel is all finished up his degree and hired me to shoot some updated photos for him for Resume, Profile, and Social Media Use. We decided to shoot on white seamless to maximize the type of shots we should get from one shoot.  White seamless is EXTREMELY versatile if you know how to use it right.  Zack Arias has some really, really good tutorials on how to maximize and nail white seamless on his blog here. Make sure to check out parts 1, 3, 4, and 5, too. With versatility in mind, we started out formal (resume use) and moved to full goofy (social media).  David Hobby shot some recent portraits for social media use that are a bit more fun, and I drew some inspiration from that for the last set.

Here’s the full shoot (around 90 minutes) in 52 seconds:

We actually got a LOT done in that time. We started with a simple Key-Fill-Hair-Background 4-light setup for the easy “regular white seamless” shot. I began like I usually do, by Building my exposure light by light-

Turned on the Key (Large Octa, Camera Left) and checked the shape and output:

Looks Good. Let’s add the fill light (in this case, a Large Softbox)

I was guessing at the ratio, and this is too much fill, we still want some texture. I think I put it down 2/3 of a stop from 1/8th to just above 1/16th.

That’s better. We’ve gotten rid of that harsh shadow-line, but kept a good ratio for separation.  Let’s add the kicker/hair light (A Speedlite Boomed, and CTOed back-camera-right)

Great!  Just a little splash of extra color, and a nice highlight to add something “extra” to an otherwise pretty straightforward portrait.  Lastly, we’ll light up the seamless with another AB800 to blow it out for the look we wanted from the start:

Looks good to me!  We’re bleeding into grey a bit at the corners, but I’ll be pretty tight, and I know I’m 255-255-255 in the middle, so I can edit the edges out easily if I need. This is the constraint of only working with a single light to light 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 from the first set, straight out-of-camera:

Great. Got that one done, Lets show off the versatility of the seamless a bit. We wanted a different look for a couple of them, so we did a small wardrobe-modification, and I threw a 10-degree grid in the light that was lighting the whole seamless. Got this:

Very Cool. We got quite a different look from a quick 30-second gear swap. Here’s what the setup for these looked Like:



Next we moved on to some less-conventional looks for non-resume purposes like social media. I wanted to go a “gear exposed” shot ala Chase Jarvis, but a bit darker (and not nearly as good ), so I set up a couple lights behind Adam bare, and a diffused beauty dish overhead (which works well because it’s a bit more contrasty and moody as a source) and we got this:

COOL!  It’s not a work of fine-art, but I really like the mood. Next up, we wanted to get some more “juicy” or “fun” shots going, so I set up a Speedlite on a chair to wash the Seamless blue, and set up the kickers/sidelights as I normally would, and got Adam to get a bit more animated and add in some props, as well as ditch the vest and purple shirt.  Yet another look in the same place with the same backdrop!  Here are a few highlights (again, straight out of camera):

Here’s what the setup was for the blue-lit-and-beauty-dish setup:


We were both really happy with the results, and we got a whole bunch of looks in one place, in a short amount of time. <3 White Seamless!

More to come!

-Rod