Wanting to spend some time in the studio to practice being able to set-up lights and being ready to shoot quicker I spent some time doing so.
I didn't have anyone to model for me so I was taking self portraits. My goal was to be able to quickly set-up lights including lights to make the background 255 white.
255 white is when the three colour channel red green blue read 255 each which means the whites hold no information and is a pure clean white.
To achieve this I pointed to barndoor strobes at 45 degree angles at the backdrop, using the barn door to flag off the light so none would spill away from the backdrop.
I metered the back lights for f/8 and metered across the entire backdrop to make sure the light was f/8 for the whole backdrop.
I used a lightstand to help me pre-focus and then stood in place, metered and took possibly a test shot to trigger the lights.
The vignetting from the lens becomes apparent but can be fixed in post. You can see around my ears and arms that some of the light from the backdrop is reflecting back at me. I could step away from the backdrop to alleviate this hwoever I didnt find the effect a massive problem.
It was also good practice in photographing people with glasses. Making sure the angle of incidence doesn't show the keylight in the reflection of the glasses.
During this shoot I was reminded at how what it was like being in front of the camera. Though I've never enjoyed having my picture taken, I don't mind doing so for my cohort as it means I can ask the same thing of them. However, I usually never see those images. Being able to see my images on the tethered computer as they came up felt awkward particularly as people were talking in and out of the studio.
Being happy with the white background I wanted to see how I could change the background just by changing the exposure of the background.
Here I turned of the back lights and allowed the backdrop to be lit from the keylight alone. The backdrop is being lit but not as much as before causing the white to become grey.
However, this also mean that light from the keylight was spilling onto the background, meaning my f/8 metering would have been wrong as I didn't meter the background with the keylight on.
This may have exacerbated the backlighting caused by the white wall reflecting back onto me.
I noticed throughout the time shooting it was hard to critique the lighting as I was too busy critiquing myself.