photographing white furniture on a white background

this is proving to be a nightmare. I've got two sb800's, and an sb600 (D200). A white backdrop (a large

roll of Savage), in a controlled setting. (no outside light, no windows, etc). I'm shooting with a tripod, no

on camera flash, but am controlling the sb's remotely with the D200.

 

I've tried this shoot twice, and it's incredibly difficult, and no matter what kind of editing I do in PS2, I can't

get a clean white background without the chair blowing out.

 

there are five pieces of furniture, (black, blue, green, natural and white) The other four pieces all sit on a

pristine white background, and the line up is supposed to include the white in the same setting.

 

Are there tricks, rules of thumb for white on white. Is it easier to cut my losses and shoot on a dark

background and then mask out? Not sure we want to spend another $200 for a gray background for this

one chair.

 

thank you for your help.

Try to get the chair farther from the backdrop, and then get more ligh directed ON the backdrop. Are you using any light modifiers, like umbrellas? You might even want two of those strobes on the backdrop, and just one, through an umbrella, at the chair. But more distance between the subject and backdrop, with plenty of light on the backdrop, is the trick. Then, with one strobe on the chair (the more diffuse the better, and filling a bit with the D200's pop-up), and your exposure set to favor just the chair, should leave you with pleny o' white background. You're setting all of this stuff manually, right? No CLS?

 

And, of course, if you don't mind uploading a sample of how it's going, that would help folks help.

Diffuse the light on the furniture, good. The 2x SB800 and 1x SB600 may not be enough.

But if you decide to invest in another grey background, it need not be useful for this one

gig only:

 

if you get one light-grey background, you can make that appear to be an endless variety

of pastel colors by using colored gels on the background light(s). So you get multiple

backgrounds for very little investment.

Why not just eliminate the background completely (erase it)?

More diffusion.

Matt is right; you have to illuminate the background. You'll need more strobe horsepower to do that. I don't know exactly how big your set is (107" roll ?), but I'm guessing you will need at least two stands, umbrellas, strobe heads, and about a 2000 ws power pack split two ways, plus a peanut slave if the power pack does not have one built in. You need to get about 1-2 stops more light reading from your background than the subject matter (just a starting point). Place the umbrellas at 45 degree angles from the background like you are illuminating flat art. Adjust so that light is as evenly spread across the backdrop as possible.

 

I think erasing the background might make the furniture look like it's levitating.

thanks everyone. So more diffusion. And Matt's comments are very helpful too. the chair is

right up against the background, and I hadn't even thought about moving it further away. for

this one I didn't use the umbrella.

 

okay, so what's a peanut slave?

It's a sensor, an 'eye' that you connect to an off-camera flashgun, it 'watches' for a flash -

from your pop-up flash, then sets the flashgun it's connected to. Not all of them function

correctly with all all flashguns, though.

Louise: you probably won't have to sweat the "peanut" or any other remote firing widgets since your camera is already capable of talking directly to all three of your strobes when they are placed remotely. You'd only use a third-party trigger if you also introduced a third-party strobe. And, if you do pony up for some Alien Bees or other beefier strobes, most of those have their own optical sensors and you can still fire them as-is, right out of the box. Good luck!

Not more diffusion, Louise. You have to illuminate the backdrop sufficiently to render it

white without that light spilling onto your furniture. Prop up some 4x8 sheets of foam

core between the umbrellas and the camera. Isolate the lighting of the background from

your subject matter as much as possible.

 

If you hope to do this sort of work more often in the future, I would invest in a set of

strobes, stands, umbrellas, etc, etc. This is a good place to start, but of course there are a

great many other possibilities:

 

http://www.white-lightning.com/

To ROBER HOOPER,

 

Interesting link, Thanks.

hi Louise ...

 

would it be possible to see a sample shot

so that we can better evaluate?

 

regards, michael

Since there are no other lights, you can lock open the shutter and use multiple pops of the flashes you have, even repositioning them if you wish. You have plenty of lights with which to do this job.

Are you shooting JPEGS or NEFs, Louise? If NEFs how are you processing (not just software

but to what bit depth and colorspace?

 

Where you putting the lights?

 

Are you lighting the background seperately from the chair?

 

Wha tare you doing to control flare?

 

Can you post samples here?

Hello Louise,

 

This is the old white on white exercise from any photo school. The object of the exercise is to separate the background lighting from the foreground through the use of distance and flagging the foreground light from hitting the background and vice versa.

 

First light the background evenly to "255" pure white. Flag those lights so none comes forward. Move the white furniture far enough foreward (towards the camera position to where none of the background light "wraps" around the sides of the furniture and )then light the furniture from the top with a front fill (card or flash head). Flag those lights so that none hits the background (turn of each set of lights -front, then back,with the other on to check spill-over).

Light the furniture 1 stop brighter or darker than the background to differentiate one from the other, yours and your clients choice as which is which. This is white on white in a nutshell. It will be difficult to do it with Nikon flash; a couple of power packs and 4 strobes heads with modeling lights will make it a slam dunk.

 

Good luck,

 

Frank M.