The traditional way of making a white background go into a seamless white look involves shining a flash’s output onto a white surface at one stop higher than your main light. But it doesn’t really need to be that way. In fact, you can do it with a single artificial light source. This tutorial works well for headshots and in the right situations and tweaks, it can work with products.
Better yet: You don’t need to spend a whole load of money.
The Lighting Setup
This looks simple enough. Essentially what you’re doing is bouncing a flash’s output off of a window shade and having a white reflector behind your subject bounce the light back. Of course, this is a much more involved process, which I’ll get to in a bit.
Here’s what I used:
However, you can do this with a much more affordable setup or even a more expensive setup. Just know that this is what I used.
Shooting
So this is the setup on real life. It’s not glamorous–but it’s more than good enough to get the job done.
A couple of notes:
- Make sure that the smoothest side of the reflector is in view of the camera. Rotate it around.
- TTL works fine enough, but with manual flash output, start at ISO 400 on your camera and around 1/16th on your flash. Then adjust from there. Try to go for the shutter speed that is in line with the reciprocal rule of shutter speeds and use a long lens. It will let the image absorb the most ambient light in the scene.
- Have your subject sit closer to the front of the seat. It will give more space between the person and the background
- If you’re doing this yourself and you’ve got a connected camera, you can basically create self portraits with ease.
Now here’s what the photo looked like out of the camera. And below is how I edited it.
Editing
Here’s how the edit went.