Makeshift Studio

Makeshift Studio

By William Lulow

This winter, while on vacation in Florida, I decided to update some family pictures that I had been late getting to earlier. We were all headed down to Florida over Christmas/New Years and I wound up packing a small, white no-seam background and my portable strobes to do a “professional” job! I always travel with these small lights and a couple of batteries, plus a couple of light stands, just in case I see something or if someone wants me to do more than just a snapshot.

So, we proceeded to set up the no-seam background by taping it to a wall and then setting up the lights to light it properly. Backgrounds need to be lit separately from the subject if you want them to be seen or be rendered a specific tone. In this case, the background was white, so I lit it directly with my portable flash units. This was the initial setup:

You can see how we taped the background to the wall and set up two lights aimed at it to render it white.

Here are the kids on the background, before any work was done to the image:

Whenever you want a white background, you need to make sure that it is at least one stop brighter than what you use for your main light. In this case, since I didn’t really pack my whole studio lighting kit, I used a flash-on-camera kit with a large bounce reflector:

Here you can see what it looks like on another shoot. It attaches directly to a flash mounted on the camera. The beauty of using a bounce rig like this is that it just about automatically makes the background lights one stop brighter because the main light is bounced!

Here is what the finished shot looks like after cropping judiciously:

You can see how much our granddaughter seems to be enjoying the whole experience!