Kens Photography Blog

I’ve tried a number of techniques for getting perfect seamless 100% “blown” backgrounds. Most people use seamless paper, a roll of paper hanging so it curves, before comming up with a better way, this was what I used, but often it doesn’t get the results I wanted.

Here’s what you need to create perfect white seamless backgrounds for product photography.

3 Strobe lights with barndoors.
2 home made diffusion panels.
2 Sawhorses.
Large sheet of plexiglass.
Quality polarizing filter.
Large white background.

For white backgorunds I don’t bother with white paper, way to expensive. Just go to your local carpeting store and buy a 3×4 meter piece of white vinyl or however large you want it. Vinyl is indestructable, and can be washed when it gets dirty. A little bit more expensive up front than a white paper roll, but it will last a lifetime so you only have to buy it once.

The polarizing filter is used to kill reflections. Sometimes you want a cool mirror reflection of your subject, sometimes not. With a quality circular polarizing filter you just turn the filter to kill the reflection, or make it appear when you want it.

A diffusion panel is just a large wooden frame with white acetate paper nailed on, shine the lights into the diffusion panel and you can model any light modifier. For soft light move the light and panel close to the subject, for harsh light move the light further away. Use the barndoors to control spill light from hitting your lens and creating flare that will cause lack of contrast, you basically never want your lense to see direct light. Diffusion panels are cheap to make and you can clamp them on anywhere with “A” clamps in seconds, so nice and flexible, I have softboxes but never use them anymore, they take up space, are a hazzle to store and expensive.

The reason you want to use plexiglass and NOT glass, is that glass will cause a double reflection and plexiglass will not. Don’t ask my why, but if you use glass, the reflection will look like there’s 2 reflections offset slightly from eachother and it makes the reflection look like blurry.

Hang the white vinyl on a wall.

Place the sawhorses about 3-4 meters in front of your white background and place the plexiglass on top of them. You need this distance so the lighting on your background doesn’t spill on your subject.

Place a strobe as low as you can shining on the background right behind where you’r subject is located horizontally. Turn off all lights but the background strobe, pull up all doors on the barndoors so light only goes forward, hitting the background only.

Adjust this strobe so when you take an image the whole image is blown and blinking, just one big horrible clipping mess, that’s what you want and no more. Don’t just fire that stobe all the way, but adjust it so it just clips the image. If you use to much light then you will have more spill and chances of flare causing lack of contrast.

Now place your subject on the plexiglass and take a shot with the background strobe still on. It should be very dark, if it’s not, move the sawhorses further away from the background.

Place your diffusion panels with a couple of clamps at the sides of the plexiglass and strobes shining in from the left and right sides. Adjust the barndoors on these strobes, so light only hits the subject, and no direct light can be seen from looking though the lense.

After a few adjustments on the side lights to get your subject exposed properly you will have a totally shadowless subject because there’s nothing below for the shadow to fall on, and a white 100% blown background with your subject just floating there, properly exposed.

The plexiglass also lets you put a white reflector below to get family of angles of shiny subject surfaces filled. You can also light from below if you have more than 3 lights. This setup lets you do darkfield and lightfield glass lighting easily. You can even put a piece of black (Or other color) cardboard on the plexiglass with a small hole in the cardboard and create self illuminated glass objects.

If you’r getting annoyed by the horizon line of the plexiglass that you have to dodge out in photoshop, just get the plexiglass deep enough that it goes all the way back to the background, then it will be blown out just like the background itself and you’d never need to work on removing it again, it’s a small thing and pretty fast to remove, but it adds up in the long run and plexiglass is not that expensive so splurge a little and get it right from the start. You can also just bend the plexiglass at the back so it bends out of the scene, like an inversed infinity wall.

Flare Problems, read on..?

If you find you’r getting flare looking like a milky/white film over your subject you’r background is probably to bright. When using only 1 strobe for a background most will instinctively turn up the power to cover a larger area. The problem with doing this is that the hotspot you get in the middle is many stops brighter than needed, this causes flare no matter how far you try to move your subject from the background because it’s so bright and your lense is point right into it.

To deal with this situation, instead of bumping up that background light, move it closer to the background and turn it down. Remember the inverse square law works in reverse to. Say you have your background light 100 centimeter from the background, moving it to 50 centimeter will make the area it covers 1 stop brighter. The light is now brigther because it’s closer, but turned down, the flare in your lense will be greatly diminished, if not gone completely.

Reposition your subject to be dead center in the whiteout area create by the background light to make sure the subject can fit inside the whiteout area and you have tamed the flare.

If you need a larger area, the only other solution is to use 2 background lights to cover it, but for most product photography 1 is plenty.