Shooting Black on Black

August 24th, 2010 by Kris

Now, we all know how tricky it is to shoot black on black and I get a lot of questions about how I manage to shoot black on black and white on white. My answer is simple, hire a great retoucher. ONLY KIDDING, but seriously a great retoucher will make your life easier. We all know though that I am a huge fan of shoot it right the first time and will make post easier, your retoucher will thank you. Even if your retoucher is you… but I digress, here’s the shot that I’m going to talk about.

Few things, first, these were shot on location, but we had an empty 30×40 room to basically build a studio there. I would recommend shooting large products on location with care. It can get really tricky.  Second, I only had my assistant Joseph with me, so I don’t ever want to hear that you just didn’t have enough hands on set. Alright, down to brass tacks, because these heaters are semi-gloss black we’ve got to be really careful about that old rule in physics: angle of incident equals angle of refection. If you don’t understand what I just said, google that stuff right now. You’re going to need to know that if you ever shoot something reflective.

So here’s basically the set up:

Now, obviously we are shooting on white here, but other than the color of the paper background, nothing changed. Let’s break this down real quick.

  1. Paper background, it’s cheap, use it, abuse it, then recycle it. I don’t even own a white or black fabric backdrop anymore. So, I was able to create “walls” with the paper.
  2. Notice now we’ve got a bare head bouncing into one of those “white walls” that we’ve created with paper and a background stand.
  3. 2 backlights, one soft for an “incident” fill and one “hair light”
  4. Now the key light here has been moved so we can move another unit into the scene but it’s a bare head being shot thru a 1 stop silk.
  5. My light ratios? Really? Alright here you go: Hair Light: f16, Incident Fill Light: f8, True Fill (Bare Head Bounce): f11 to f8, Shot the whole thing at f13 and called it a day.

The real key here is getting the angle correct, this particular product required a bit more angle because it’s so long. Just be aware that the old way that you’ll see a black object on black is the little bit of fill that you add.

If you’ve got questions, email me and I’ll try and help if I can. Have an amazing day! Now go make something amazing!!

Till next time. -Kris

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