anyone done studio based photography....advice needed

[redline]

well i just got the basics down in class yeterday with contiuous lighting - tungsen and flash.
does anyone have any exp. using a projector to display a bg on the wall to shoot your subject with?

[Nnnnsic]

I've wanted to do it, but never have. You might have to set a bit of distance between the subject and the background and then simulate similar lighting to achieve the effect you want.

[MHD]

me too... Always wanted to do it but just havent...

We've got an art room at college I might set up as a basic studio... might go get some lights etc...

[gstark]

It's not something that I've tried either.

However, you need to carefully balance your lighting; if you're using strobes, they will be likely to greatly overpower whatever you're using for your background illumination. Also, you'd need to ensure that none of your subject lighting spills over onto the background; this would be detrimental to your desired target image.

I would imagine that colour balance could be an issue too; what we think we see in real life has a great deal of compensation applied by the way that our eyes and brain interpret what we're seeing.

[redline]

heres what i was thinking of


i don't know if my lenses are going to be able to focus this close.



but i don't want to do this outdoors cos i dont want to be arrested for carrying a weapon in public

[leek]

Just a thought, but why not shoot the subject/person in the studio (against a high contrast and/or brightly lit background) and then photoshop the background in in PP...

Not sure if it would look more convincing than a projected background, but it might be worth a comparison...

[redline]

i did think of that but i wanted to avoid using pp as much, just as a last resort if all eles fails.

[JordanP]

This may not be helpful in the short term but Nulab have been running heaps of seminars on this type of work lately. I think they are even selling videos of the conference but its pretty $$$pricey$$$ from memory.

[gstark]

Nulab?

Pricey ?

Surely not?

[JordanP]

hey, but for professional printing I don't find them too bad

[kipper]

JordanP I was at NuLabs on Monday and yes, they were advertising it a lot it.

They call it VirtualBackground, think Kodak are the company behind it. They had a whole stand there about it.

All it is, from what I can see is using as was said before I high contrast background (eg. blue screen) and have the subject stand in front of this and then super impose that onto a background. I think it was the fact they probably had a library of every background you could possibly think of. Plus they might do some other things such as ensuring that the subjects shadow interacts with the scene correctly and vice versa. Not too hard to do with some single high contrast colored props in the studio for the shadows to cast onto. That way you can get the shadows into Photoshop. There are probably some other ways using programs such as 3DStudio, LW or Maya to also superimpose studio work onto a virtual background.