Michael J Huxley Photography

(Many apologies to the Stones for the awful pun in the title, but come on, I live for this type of humor.)

Phew! Finally got my computer back (had to get a completely new one, the last one was a dud – the 27″ iMacs are great, but the first ones to come out were riddled problems), and I’ve had time to shoot a few times (at least one of which I’ll be adding to the blog in the next couple of days). But before I get to that, I wanted to shoot an experiment with my various modifiers and see how far back I had to get from my white seamless before I could get a solid black. This is a pretty neat experiment and one I recommend doing for yourself whenever you pick up a new modifier. I’ve been thinking about building myself a studio over the past few weeks and I wanted to know how much room would be optimal (optimal, and then, of course, realistic) and here’s the results of the first test.

The first test was with my 60″ umbrella, which throws light everywhere and would require me to get the farthest back. The light-to-subject (me) distance did not change, but I would scoot the setup away from the background 1.5′ (the number of feet are written on a white board which I’m holding up) at a time and take a picture and see how much things changed. This is also helpful for when I want to get a specific shade of grey out of the white seamless, then I’ll know exactly how far away I need my subject. I won’t post all the images, but most of the major changes. Also, once I got a bit away from the background, the changes got more and more subtle (probably due to that pesky Inverse Square law) so I started shifting forward by greater amounts. One final word on these pictures: I’m terrible at self-portraits, so most of these are a bit blurry. I don’t feel that that is all that important for this series. What’s important is the change of shade in the background.

My setup:

• Nikon d300s with a 50mm 1.8 lens
• 1 Vivitar 285hv in a 60″ shoot-thru umbrella
• a large reflector on the opposite side of my face
• Shutter speed: 1/250th @ f/2.5

What I also learned, is that I can get about 13′ away from my background for a headshot without getting the sides of the background paper in. And you can see, this gets my background pretty dark.

Keep an eye out for more of these kinds of experiments. This stuff is tedious, but it’s stuff that you really need to know. Knowing your equipment inside and out is the key to really being able to get your client to relax. If you’re bumbling with your equipment, you start to get nervous and it shows, and it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

Got questions? Wanna see how a certain modifier looks under the same experiment? I got more coming, but hit me up in the comments if you’ve got a specific request. Thanks for reading!