Lighting for digital Dave Montizambert – Faking It

Most studio photographers buy backgrounds for what they are and not for what they could be. These backgrounds are usually evenly lit and somewhat correctly exposed, however, if you use a little imagination and have a little knowledge of how light works you can create some truly unique backgrounds from a simple neutral coloured surface like a wall or seamless backdrop paper. Case in point, if you look at the skyscape backdrop behind models Shandy Nickerson and Scott Putman in my image entitled “Trust” (see Image 001), you will see a big fat lie for a background – this fake background is an illusion created with lighting effects. By carefully crafting shadows on a white seamless backdrop, the background behind the subjects appears to have depth even though it is just a flat surface. The most important control for making this fake background work is controlling the edges of the shadows, the trick being to make these shadow edges really soft or fuzzy. In a reallife skyscape, clouds have soft edges and so in Image 001 the background shadows need to mimic this if the sky illusion is to work. Creating soft-edged shadows for this background is mainly about size and distance of the background light source.

In Image 001, the background appears to be a blue sky with fluffy white clouds; to create this simulated sky, a mono-block studio strobe (flash) fitted with its parabolic reflector was placed to the camera-right-side of a white seamless backdrop paper (a white wall works just as well), see Image 004. The strobe was horizontally angled so that it was aimed at the other side (the camera-left-side) of the paper. Feathering the light in this way towards the opposite end of the seamless paper helped to even out the exposure over the whole background. The light from this source was made blue with the addition of a Roscolux Sky-Blue number 68 gel over the light-source’s front, see Images 002, 003 and 004. This blue gel is very dense and so absorbs several stops of light, if you find you don’t have the power to get the brightness you want, consider creating a less intense blue background by using a less dense, less intense blue gel such as a blue correction gel which corrects 3,200° Kelvin tungsten light to 5,000° Kelvin daylight light – this lighter blue gel absorbs less light. Once the gel was in place, the power of the strobe was dialed up or down until a -1 to -2 reflective meter reading was obtained over the surface of the white paper – a minus one means that it reads one stop darker than the camera exposure setting, and a minus 2 means that it reads two stops darker than the camera exposure setting.

From the opposite side of the seamless, another light fitted with its parabolic reflector was added, see Image 004. This light requires a frosted acetate diffusion gel such as a Roscolux Tuff-Frost gel, but does not need the blue gel. This strobe head was aimed so that its light energy spreads evenly across the seamless backdrop, as we did with the blue light. The power of this light source was set to give a +1 to +2 reflective meter reading across the white seamless’ surface. You may be thinking that the addition of this white light completely overpowers the blue light making the blue light seem pointless but we are not done yet – a cucoloris also called a “cookie” needs to be added to selectively block some of the white light from the background so that the “blue sky” can selectively show through, see Images 001 and 004. A cucoloris is usually a rectangular piece of card or thin plywood with shapes cut into it, but for this background effect I instead opted for a branch full of leaves. The leaves serve to selectively block the light as does a traditional cucoloris, but the leaves make for more believable clouds because they are at different distances from the light source giving greater depth in the skyscape, whereas the shapes cut in the card or board of the cucoloris are all on the same plane. Also the leaves are not rigid and can be individually moved to better shape the projected shadows on the background. Controlling how soft edged the shadows are is paramount for this lighting effect to look believable.

Studio strobe preview:
DID YOU KNOW? A modeling light is really a preview light on a strobe (flash) head. It is usually positioned with the strobe tube wrapped around it and it has a similar light coverage as the strobe tube. Since the strobe only creates light for a fraction of a second you cannot see its effect by eye on the subject. A modeling light is constant light instead of a burst of light, it allows you to see a close approximation of what the strobe will do. When creating shadow effects on a background, be aware the modeling light tungsten bulb is not exactly the same as the strobe tube and so the projected shadows can appear a little different on the background when compared with how they look in an actual capture. This is easily fixed by adding some diffusion material over the light source (use a heat- and fire-resistant material like Roscolux Tuff-frost to prevent fires) making the shadows created with the modeling bulb look the same as the shadows created with the strobe tube.

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