Just finished a delivered images from a weekend shoot with SweetTable. This time we decided to not only shoot the beautiful table of treats they created, but also treat it like a portrait shoot for their website. For more images, click through below (also contains a bit of info from behind the scenes of this shoot) or visit their gallery and blog pages.
Trouble with backgrounds (a behind the scenes story)
This shoot was a bit of an improvised situation in that I had never seen the design/colours of the setup nor the space we were shooting in. So for those that are interested in the problem solving that goes into a shoot like this, I thought I’d discuss a bit of it here.
The primary issues stemmed from the fact that there was very little room between the background and the table. Ideally we’d have a bigger backdrop placed further away, thrown out of focus, and lit with a single even source of light. However since we wanted to shoot this in the Sweettable.ca workspace, we had to solve a few issues. This was further complicated by the fact that the background just didn’t want to stay wrinkle free (even though the material ended up being a bit of a blessing in disguise). The few things that helped were:
– Instead of one background light, we placed two SB-800’s along the bottom pointed at the opposite sides of the backdrop to even out the coverage.
– Placing another strobe behind the material was quite helpful with the cotton material. It allowed the backlight (bounced off the wall) to fill in small wrinkle shadows caused by the necessary proximity of the lights on the other side.
– We placed another table cloth behind the Teal sheet to add further diffusion to the bounced backlight
– Using grids on the softboxes also allowed us to reduce spill (and other shadows) from the primary sidelight for the girls and their tasty treats.
Hope that little bit of troubleshooting was helpful to some of you. Perhaps that’ll help some of you the next time you’re up against a (literal) wall. Now onto the important part, a few of the actual portraits of the talents behind sweettable.ca.
The Portraits
As always, a pleasure working with you Marc.
Such beautiful, bright colours.