We all have to make the best of a space on the day of a shoot. Some times I have to use an office or warehouse space which is not always as big as I would like, but you got to get the job done so you get on with what space you have to work with. On some of my shoot’s I have to use the inside of a home as the backdrop and I can’t always get far back as I would like for the shot’s and find myself up against the wall so to speak!
On this shoot I had only the living room space to shoot in. We moved all the furniture out and set down a white board on the floor as it had carpet, which would be an issue with a model in high heeled shoes. I also put up a pink seamless paper as the background which worked with the color of clothes I was given for this shoot. The model in these shot’s is the lovely Playboy® Playmate Cathy St Gorge who is fun to work with and also happens to be a super makeup artist.
For my lighting I used two strip lights on each side of the set to light the backdrop. If you don’t do this you will find two things happening one it’s going to be dark and the other is you will see a hard shadow of the model. So to stop this happening I make the light just bright enough to keep any shadow’s from being cast by the model. I always see people letting a shadow fall off onto the background which I think is just lazy on the part of the photographer as they could just put a bit more light on the background to remove it. But I think they think that’s what you do if you shoot fashion in a studio. Wrong!!!
I also had two light’s in the front of the model in what I call starfish (Modifiers) they are like shoot-through umbrella’s with silver backing. One was on a boom and the other was on a short stand (Floor) they were each to one side of the model left and right. (See diagram).
I did this so I could shoot full length and not have them in my shot. Also by doing this the light is a bit softer as I am using the edges of each of the light’s that are being used to cast light on the model. It’s sort of a cross lighting but I do not get a shadow on each side of the model’s nose. Which you would see if the lights were much closer to each other and more direct & I was using harder light from the center of each light.
As you can see in the images the contrast of the white floor and the pink backdrop looks nice and the model in the black PVC jumps out at you in the shot’s I made one of the images BW and I have that shot on sale in my shop as a Platinum Palladium print.