First strobist experience in studio photography

Last friday I was asked to take pictures for the 'Mobility Day' at Lampiris. Since I just received my studio kit with lightstands, umbrella's and backdrop from eBay, I decided to turn it into a studio shoot. It was only a partial success.

The setup

The theme for the day was "Mobility, it's child's play". Lampiris employees who came by bike were offered a healthy breakfast. Given the theme, I decided to photograph each participant with a children's bike, a stroller or a step. I got all of the props in my car and set off for the shoot. I arrived at 7h30. Between 8h and 8h30 about 30 people would be arriving for the breakfast. They did not know in advance that they were supposed to take part in a photoshoot.

The equipment

I used 2 lightstands, one with a big white shoot trough umbrella as the main light and a smaller one as the fill light. I also brought a tripod to mount a third flash with an aluminum foldable snoot to use as a rimlight. A fourth flash was positioned behind the backdrop in an attempt to make the backdrop completely white.
I used 2 stands with a crossbar to hold up the backdrop, which was made out of some kind of paper fabric. Since I was going to do full lenght shots, the backdrop continued under the feet of the models.
The flashes were triggered with cheap radio triggers. I mounted the Nikon 35mm AF DX lens on my D5100 and put it on f5.6/125s and shot in RAW.

The flashes I used was a Nikon SB-28, a SB-600, a Sunpak 4000 AF and a Metc Mecablitz 30.

Problem 1: backdrop folds

Unfortunately, the backdrop was supplied folded and the folds created really nasty shadows. I tried to iron those folds out of the fabric, but the fabric just melted. This material seems to be paper with a bit of plastic in it. It is (and looks) very cheap. I'll look for something else to use as a backdrop in the future.

Problem 2: background not pure white

Since this backdrop was quite translucent and since it had small holes in it, I had the idea to light it from the back. I had enough room behind my setup and pointed my Sunpak flash to the center of the backdrop, zoomed out all the way. There was still quite a lot of light falloff at the edges and even the center wasn't bright enough to blow out completely. I was already at f5.6 and didn't want to take the risk to go to an even larger aperture.

Problem 3: Rim light was too much sideways

I positioned the tripod with the snooted Metz flash right next to the backdrop. But since the subjects were relatively close to the background (I didn't have much height in the room to play with), the angle resulted in about 45 degrees sideways. This added an interesting effect to the light, but it wasn't the rimlight I intended it to be. Another problem is that the snoot was too concentrated when multiple people were in the frame (also see the next problem).

Problem 4: People don't listen

The biggest problem I had during the shoot was that my lighting and set were built up for 1 person at the time. I didn't anticipate that since people came together in small groups that they would want to have their picture taken together. The set wasn't really big enough for this. I ran out of backdrop, I ran out of flash power and I ran out of room to back up with my camera.

Problem 5: Too much fill light from everywhere

I lowered the power of the key light to have a high key lighting at f5.6 to make the background as white as possible. Then I lowered the fill light to half of that, but this was still too much. I should have reduced the fill light further, but I ran out of preparation time. Furthermore I have the impression that the white room in which the umbrella's were right against the white ceiling reflected a lot of light, essentially already functioning as a multi-directional fill light. I also had a lot of light spill from the back-illuminated backdrop.

Problem 6: I shoot faster than my flashes

After a few shots I started "doing the strobist dance". Your models are on the set, you take a shot and then need to wait 6 to 10 seconds for the next shot. This is a long time when you have 4 people modeling. So you need to keep their attention by pretending to be focusing, by adjusting their hair or generally keeping them busy until your flashes are ready again. The "just a moment, we're waiting" attitude takes a lot of spontaneity out of any shot. In reality this means most of the time your first shot will be the best one.

Postproduction

The pictures turned out OK in the end. On each picture, I had to make the background go white. I decided I didn't want to cutout the subjects in Photoshop (too much work and too artificial), but I used the adjustment tool in Lightroom with contrast to 100%, shadows to 100%, highlights to -100% and exposure to 0.6 to 1.7, whichever was needed to make the background (and the creases in it) go unnoticed without having to much difference in luminosity with other area's of the image where the background showed through (for example through the wheel of a bicycle. I didn't go as far as also painting this in with the adjustment brush.) Since the pictures had to be published a few hours later, I only made rough selections, relying on the 'smart mask' option of the tool.

Before:

After:

Conclusion: work hard or work smart

I managed to save the shoot with quite a lot of extra work. What I should have done was use 2 flashes to light the background from the front: one from the left and another one from the right. I could use the flash from the fill light for this, since it wasn't really necessary. The rim light should have been positioned in the center of the backdrop just on top of it. Maybe I even shouldn't have snooted it to accomodate for the larger groups.

I learned a lot in this experiment and I had a lot of fun doing so. I'm already looking forward to the next shoot!

Watch the whole set here on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.733080866742891.1073741879.353634754687506&type=1