Shooting on a white seamless background can be tricky. It gets easier with better gear and a lot of room, but if you’ve got neither, shooting on white can be a real pain. I experimented a bit with a quick 2-light setup today, trying to put together something I could use when I have to pull off a quick portrait on white without turning it into a big production.
One of the main difficulties in shooting on white is to shield your lens from your strobes. With a usual 3-light setup you have 2 lights hitting the background from the sides creating an evenly lit background. With the strobes coming in from the sides, you have to shield them from your lens, which means you need room. And, obviously, you need 3 lights. But what about the times you got neither? If all you want to do is a decent head-shot portrait, you can get by with 2 flashes and a white or light colored wall.

Basic idea is to use your subject as a screen for the background light. Put a speedlight on a lightstand and aim it at an upward angle against the wall behind the subject. Position your subject directly in front of the strobe and use your second flash to light it.
In case you’re new to this, this video is a good start to get to know the different styles of lighting you can achieve with one light:

Now it’s time to start making testshots until the background is blown out to white but without “wrap” around your subject, meaning your subject keeps seperation from the background without any background light spilling onto it. Shooting ISO 200 at f 2.8, I had to dial down my strobes almost to the minimum, running on 1/100th power with an SB-600(!) Most SLRS offer a blinking highlight warning feature which is supposed to warn you of parts of your picture blowing out to white. In this case this is what we want, so if the background is nice and blinking, you’re good to go. Once the background is taken care of, you only need to bring up your subject with your second strobe and you’re done. (For the examples on this page I used an SB900 through a Sambesi Softbox as the main light and a bare SB600 for the background. You don’t need much power, the SB600 was running on 1/100th power, the SB900 on 1/40th power!)

Obviously, this setup only works with rather tight portraits, you don’t want to try and light a full body shot with it. But for quick portraits, this can be a quick and simple solution which you can pull off pretty much anywhere.

For (much) more in depth advice concerning shooting on white, I’d suggest you make the jump over to Zack Arias’ blog. He’s done a couple of great posts on that subject, check them out here.

It’s done. If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you may know that for some time I’ve been working on my new website. While I liked the old one, I wanted a more elegant way to show my images. My pal Stefan found me a great basic structure to work with and did a great job with the custom work. I spent a lot of the time choosing the images I wanted to show and created a completely reworked portfolio including much more of my recent work.

I also added images from a couple of photo series (including the Boulderwelt shoot) I shot, you can find those under “projects”. A few scans from recent publications featuring my work can be found under “tearsheets”.

Check out the new website here: www.brunoaxhausen.com

A couple of issues remain, but most should be worked out in the coming days. If you come across any problems with the new site, a short email or a comment here on the blog would be greatly appreciated!

I hope you enjoy your visit!

Some photoshoots have more to do with building a house than with making a picture. You rig stuff, erect walls, lay cables, put up backgrounds and paint entire studio interiors in the colour you need. Then you set up lights, sometimes only one, sometimes a dozen. You shape that light, screen that light from the lens, direct it and push it around. Then you take the picture, and after a 1/250th of a second you’re done. And the house you built all day, all the lights, backgrounds, boxes and stands are taken down and stowed away. This is always the time where I have a hard time shaking a feeling of futility. You spend a day building something and then, after a few shots, you tear it all down and everything’s the way it was before. (Well it better be, because otherwise you tend to get in trouble with the studio manager…)

It’s a strange feeling, especially since I enjoy this work so much. But in those moments after a shoot, I tend to feel weary of the whole affair. But then I look at the pictures we made. And I can’t wait to start over and build another house.

Some pictures take years to be made. And some take less than a day. Our neighborhood is full of interesting little shops and the most intriguing is a small bicycle repair shop. It’s a tiny workroom, stuffed with dozens of bicycles, replacement parts and tools. A while ago I went by the store and had a feeling that there might be a picture there. I made a note and forgot about it.

Today, while being slightly grumpy about a not so promising day, I remembered that shop and decided to walk over and simply ask the owner if he’d mind if I made a portray of his shop sometime. I was thinking about scheduling a date for sometime in the next couple of weeks. Conversation went something like this:

Me: Hi, I really like your shop and would love to take a picture of it sometime…
Owner: Sure, 3 o’clock?
Me: …
Me: Sure.

I walked off, slightly confused by how easy that went when it hit me: I didn’t have most of the equipment I’d need. My lightstands were still at a friend’s studio, I didn’t have a decent wide angle lens for the kind of shot I wanted to do and I had no idea how I could create the kind of light I wanted for this shot.
The next couple of hours turned out a little hectic, racing all the way across town to collect my gear, borrow a 17-35mm 2.8 wide angle lens from another photographer and figuring out the lighting while riding on the subway. In the end I had an hour left to make a couple of test shots at home before packing my bags and walking over to the store.
I set up my lights, made a couple of testshots and told the owner I was ready. Took 5 images, said “Thank you”, packed my gear and left. That’s it. Not everything has to be a big production, some images don’t even take a day.

Setup
The basic idea was having the subject stand in front of his workbench / bicycles / tools with a rather narrow light hitting his face that should fall of quickly towards his torso. The background I wanted to be light enough to make out details but without drawing the viewer’s eye away from the subject’s face.
As a main light, a beauty dish would have been perfect, the only drawback being that I don’t have one. So I chose the next best thing, an old pizza carton wrapped around my SB-600. It forms a narrow snoot, channeling the light and throwing a very tight spotlight onto the subject.
For the background I was initially hoping that a slightly longer shutterspeed and moderately raised ISO setting would suffice. As it turned out it didn’t, so I put up an SB-900 on a lightstand, raised it up as high as possible and aimed it at the ceiling. That way, the light bounced back from the ceiling as a softer and more even illumination, without changing the overall feeling of the store. It also helped with putting slight reflections on the metallic parts in the store.