Shooting White on White. How I do it........

I've written before about shooting stuff for Zachary Scott Theater, here in Austin, Texas.  I've been doing it for 17 years and I'm still having fun.  We shoot three major categories of photographs.  The first is set up shots to be used in marketing pieces to promote current and upcoming productions.  The second category are the "running shoots".  These are reportage style shoots that take place during the final dress rehearsal.  The third category are the shoots I do for the season brochures.  These are marathon sessions where we shoot to a concept that will be used throughout the year as both the theater's branding image and thematic leitmotif.  The images here are from the first category.  General promotion for a show.

Shown in these images is the cast of "Altar Boys", a really fun musical comedy.  But I'm presenting them here in rough form to show how I light white background images.

Yep.  That's me up on that bench pointing a Nikon D700 with an old 24-85mm zoom lens at the actors.  That's my ancient Gitzo carbon fiber tripod and you can see why I love it.  Even without the center column extended it reaches up seven feet tall.  I like shooting down.  It's a fun angle.  The shorts and sandals are mandatory summer wear here in Austin.

The front light is very simple.  It's a huge 84 inch Lastolight umbrella with its own, built in white diffusion panel.  It's beautifully soft.  Even when used twelve to fifteen feet from the subject.  Why the heck would I use it so far away?  Well, if you remember the inverse square law, the further away the light source the less fall off there is from side to side in the image.  And you can see how evenly the actors are lit.  The only other frontal modifier is a silver 48 inch reflector panel to the opposite side.

The nuts and bolts of getting a good, white background are simple:  You want very even lighting across the entire background.  That's why I'm using four umbrellas.  You want to make sure the light from the umbrellas doesn't spill forward and strike the subjects directly.  That's why we carefully focus the light sources into black backed umbrellas.  Finally, you want to forget all the nitwits who say you don't need a meter if you have a digital camera and you want to pull out your incident light meter and make sure that the white background (according to your incident light meter) is one third to one half of one stop brighter than the light on your subject.  Anything brighter and you risk the light bouncing off the background, wrapping around the edges of the subjects and degrading the whole image.  Once your histogram hits 255 how do you measure 1/3rd of a stop more?  You can do it easily and quickly with an incident light meter!

That's pretty much the long and short of it.  Each of the background lights was a self contained, 300 ws monolight while the main light was powered by a Profoto 1200 ws Acute and one head.  We shot maybe 250 shots with different groupings, expressions and gestures.  The finals were used in brochures, newspaper ads, post cards and on the web.  When we finished with the project my assistant, my friend Will and I went to Chuy's for some Tex Mex food.

A more in depth explanation of this set up is in my book: Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Studio Photography, from Amherst Media.

If you want to dive into how I shoot portraits we're doing a day long workshop in Austin, Texas on February 13th.  Hit this for the sign up page.....

beautiful people are everywhere. get them into your studio.

Hardly a day goes by that I don't see absolutely beautiful people out walking on the streets, in the coffee shops and at the grocery store.  This is Mousumi.  I met her when I did a press check on a print project.  I did what I usually do:  I told her I would like to make a portrait of her, asked her to check out my website and to call me if she felt inclined.  That's really all you can do.  But I try to do it when I am confronted with beautiful people because I know that if I do nothing I may never have that opportunity again and I'll regret it.

There is a scene in the movie, Citizen Kane, where on old man in a monumental office is being interviewed and he is reminiscing about his past.  He remembers a day in his youth.  He was about to take the Staten Island ferry out and was watching a ferry coming in.  At the front rail was a woman about his age that he described as the most beautiful vision he'd ever seen.  He wanted to go and meet her.  Somehow strike up a conversation.  But he didn't.  And his boat was leaving.  And he got on and left.
And eight decades later, with moist eyes and a hesitant voice, filled with emotion, he says, "And there isn't a day that's gone by since then that I don't think about her...."  The regret of entropy, of procrastination.

I think every portrait photographer has in mind certain kinds of faces, and people with certain kinds of energy, that resonate with their styles.  If you depend only on paid commissions to do your art you may never be blessed with the kinds of subjects that add a vital spark to your process.  Without that spark of energy all you have is a job.

I think one of our goals as artists is to discover beauty and share it.  To make our interpretation of beauty a part of the fabric of our collective culture.  It's a wonderful responsibility.

A fun, interesting, happy advertising job.

I didn't want too much time to go by this year without celebrating the jobs that make advertising photography fun, interesting and addictive.  And this job for client, LifeSize, definitely fits the bill.  I always love getting a phone call from my friends at the advertising agency, Clutch Creative.  Jason and Steve, the two owners and creative directors do really nice creative work, they have fun on their projects and they value their collaborators.

When they sent me the brief they were clear and concise.  Just for good measure they sent along comprehensive layouts (called "comps" in the industry....) so I'd know what they needed and how we should bid.  Our bid included pricing for the actual shoot as well as usage fees for their intended uses.  In putting together an advertising shoot there is so much more to consider than just how to shoot the photo.
Who would be making the props (including the screens that each actor is holding up in their photo)?  Who would do the casting?  Who handles wardrobe and what wardrobe do we need to bring?  How would we handle shooting the scenes that were dropped into the background?  Where would we shoot some of the big sets we needed to construct for the shots against white background?  How would the individual parts be composited together?  How would we feed and provide snacks for  a revolving door of models, make up people, assistants, agency creatives and clients?

We ended up using the living room of my house as the shooting studio.  It measures twenty four feet wide by nearly 50 feet deep and has very high ceilings.  With the help of my assistant, and the patience of my wife, we moved all the furniture onto our screened back porch.  And the night before the shoot we set about putting up white seamless paper and designing the lighting for the first series of shots.  My regular studio, which is just outside the front door of my house, would serve as a facility to store props and wardrobe and would provide a nice space for our make up artist to work in.

When you shoot against a white background it is critical to be able to place the model far enough forward from the background that there is no spill or "wrap around" light coming from the background which might lower the contrast or provide unwanted fill.  In set ups like these an incident light meter is critical to me.  The background must be metered to be one third to one half of a stop brighter than the main subject exposure.  Too bright and you'll have light bouncing forward that is unwanted.  To dim and you'll need to cut out each object, point by point in Photoshop instead of being able to use speedier drop out  tools.  While many will say that they can use the histogram in their camera I've never been able to camera meter something that's whiter than white, reliably!

We scheduled our talent to arrive in waves because, in addition to doing ads with individuals in them, we were also grouping three and four people together and using them in conference room shots and office shots.  The background photographs were shot on separate days.  Our first talent was in make up by 8am on the first day.  We shot these ads several years ago so the camera we used at the time was the Nikon D2x.  We always used the D2x at its base ISO of 100 and tried to use the lenses at their tested optimum apertures.  Generally f5.6 or f8.  We shot the talent and the screen in one shot because we needed the direction and the quality of light to match.

We used a ton of lights.  Four Profoto 300 ws monolights on the background, each firing into white umbrellas with black "spill kill" backings.  Each bank (left and right) of the lights on the background were flagged with black panels to control spill.  We used a Profoto 600 box with two heads throttled all the way down to provide  gridded backlits to help separate our key subjects from the background.  The main light was a 60 inch Octabox with a Profoto light head attached to a 1200 watt second box.

Timing from shot to shot was critical as was the ability to work quickly in setting up and tearing down group settings.  We shot tethered to a laptop so the creative guys could evaluate every change of light, expression and gesture.  The shoot took place over four days.  After the shoot was wrapped we still had a mountain of work to do.  We had to reset the living room to ensure domestic tranquility, reset the studio to ensure some kind of work flow and then return all the stuff we'd borrowed.  Finally, we settled into the giant edit and sent over 1200 likely candidates for the campaign.

No light failures.  No camera failures.  Totally professional talent, sourced from a real agency (Agence Talent), meant no cancellations or "no shows".  No human failures to speak of.

In part I am writing this because we're about to ramp up for another big, multi-day shoot and this blog serves to remind me of all the things I need to get done before we can start.  I hope my luck holds and the universe isn't carrying a grudge with me for anything.    I'll share another campaign with you soon.

Thank you very much for reading and participating.  Really makes this all worthwhile.  Kirk

That's a wrap.