I did several photo shoots, and while some refinement is in order (“systematic” is not my middle name), I was able to greatly improve my shots. Here is what worked for me and what didn’t.
The set-up: I had four yarn hippos: red, yellow, blue, and dark dusty purple. I tried many approaches to photographing them against a white paper background, both separately and together. Unless otherwise noted all light came from a large east-facing window.
The goal: Pure, featureless white background with good color and exposure of the hippos in front. I figure if you can accomplish THX 1138-style unbroken white, other pale backgrounds will be easy.
Vocabulary: I cropped basically everything below, even the shots labeled “unretouched,” but shots so labeled are otherwise as the camera uploaded them. I refer to a color or object “blowing out” to mean the situation where the bright parts are so bright that they’ve taken on an unnatural glow, and maybe even whited out.
All Together:
Position matters. Check out the difference between the unretouched photos below, both taken with the Cloudy setting, evaluative metering (iPhoto calls it pattern), +1 exposure, and 200 ISO (chosen by the camera), within two minutes of each other. The photo area is not square to the window; instead, if the center back of the photo is 12 o’clock, the windows are at 4:30 or 5:00. Putting the blue hippo in more light and the red one in less improved the exposure of both. Unfortunately, that’s about as bright as it gets without blowing out the yellow hippo – I can increase the exposure by about 0.1 in iPhoto.
Backlighting seems to help. I wondered whether brightening the backdrop with my Ottlites (true color craft lights, chosen over my actual photography lights because of the smaller region of illumination) would help get a whiter background without blown-out yellow, and I think it did. It is difficult to compare to the shots above, which were taken on a different day. The photos below (unfortunately I forgot to get a comparison shot with the lights off) are the same shot, taken with the Cloudy setting and evaluative metering at +2/3 exposure, camera-chosen ISO of 80, one unretouched and the other with the exposure raised another 0.6 in iPhoto.
Continue reading Better Photography 1: color and contrast on white