So a while back, I wrote a post about our white backdrop shoots, and… it has disappeared. I can find my “WHY” post, but not my “how” post. So, I’m posting a new one!
For a quick recap, we started doing white backdrop photoshoots in 2009. I wanted to specifically recreate the Sally Jupiter “pin-up” art from Watchmen, and brought the idea up to my photographer husband. He thought that sounded like a fun challenge, so we set about figuring it out.
And once we had the backdrop and all – I figured why not shoot some more costumes on it? And then some more, and then some more… and now I’m in the mindset of SHOOT ALL THE COSTUMES!! I love a good on-location shoot too, but the ease of throwing up a backdrop in our living room and knocking out 8-10 costumes in a day is a good deal to me. Plus, I like having matching photos of everything — oh, here I am just rehashing the “why” post, so let’s move on.
First up, we have two white paper backdrops – a smaller 4ft wide version, and a bigger 8ft wide version. Both we bought at the local photography supply store. There’s a TON of paper on these things, so as the bottom part gets dirty, we simply cut it off. We use the 8-footer for large costumes, the 4-footer for smaller ones. Using backdrop stands, we can set up either in our living room or garage. Here’s the 8-footer set up in our living room, as you can see, Padme would not have fit on the smaller backdrop!
To hold down the leading edge of the backdrop, we use two white tile boards from Home Depot. Chase says these are called “shiny white gloss pressboard.” They provide a nice reflective surface to stand on.
And now I’ll let Chase explain everything else, since this is all greek to me: “I use two side speedlights (flashes) on each side behind the model, pointed roughly 45 degrees at backdrop, sometimes using a foamcore “flag” to block the bounceback on the model. Then I use a main strobe flash with some type of diffusion, preferably a beauty dish or a Paul Buff PLM (Parabolic Umbrella) for greater light wrapping.” This shot of Batgirl shows up the entire set-up pretty well:
The goal is to keep clean-up in post as minimal as possible, but there’s almost always something to fix somewhere. The floor tiles have quite a few scuffs on them at this point, as well as some tape — and the lines of where we join them together tend to show. So that gets cleaned up in post. You can see the tile lines here pretty well:
Generally, if there’s any white balance or levels to fix on the photo in general, doing that will drop the rest of the shadows on the background out. Sometimes the far edges have to be fudged, especially when using the smaller backdrop or when the beauty dish or one of the flash stands got in the way in the corner. A good case in point – my white Anne Boleyn dress from 2014 looked smashing right out of the camera:
(Notice the edge of the beauty dish sneaking in in the corner).
I actually didn’t want to lose the shadows in the background because I loved how it looked! I posted on my blog agonizing about it, because I didn’t know what to do. In the end I did lower them a bit more than I would have liked to, just so I could keep these shots in line with all the other ones, since my goal is to have matching photos of everything.
And, sometimes, the flashes don’t fire and you end up with a white backdrop that looks grey, like this Johanna shot:
I actually LOVE this shot, it’s one of my favs from that set, but again, it doesn’t match what we’ve done in the past, so while I kept it, I still had the standard white shots for posterity. It also just goes to show how much you can change the look by playing with the set-up. Another example – my Peggy close-up shot was ALSO done on the white backdrop, just sitting further out from it than normal and changing up the flash set-up.
And finally, here’s a timelapse video of a backdrop set-up Chase did a few years ago! Plus bonus Indy helping 🙂