How to make a light background

Thanks for an interesting tutorial and the result looks good.

I have a question. Why do you put the baking parchment over the white paper? If you are trying to cover the gaps between the sheets of paper, an easier approach would be to use a larger piece of white paper that covers the whole background area. If you make it large enough, you can also "sweep" it over the ground as well. This gets rid of that seam line at the back of the photo.

Example. Plain paper sweep.



Or are you using the baking parchment to diffuse the light? This only works if you have light shining through it. So, a useful way to do this would be to have your entire sweep made of something transluscent (such as baking parchement or a light tent) and then light this from behind. You can also interpose opaque objects between the backlight and the diffusing surface to make shaped shadows.

Example. A light tent with a light behind it and some strips of cardboard lain against the wall of the tent.



You will still need to have a light to the front to illuminate the figure and will need play around a bit to make sure the two light sources don't clash with eachother. However, you can get some interesting effects if you choose two light sources that don't match. For example, I used a daylight bulb behind the diffuser on this one and a weak tungsten lamp to illuminte the figure. I wanted warm skin tones, and it also gives some intruiging purple shadows on the figure.



Do excuse the awful focus on that one. It is a very OLD photo.

I would be really interested to get any more ideas people might have for using light backgrounds as it still something I don't do that often. I need inspiration!

 

this is great, i always wanted to know this, thankyou guys