We posted an Instagram story over the weekend showing you some behind the scenes looks into our ‘at home studio’ set up! If you missed it, we transformed our living room into a mini-studio. Jon cleared out the furniture and brought in a solid white backdrop and some studio strobes that we needed to practice with for an upcoming shoot. While the lights we were using were the most exciting part for us (Profoto D1 1000 watt studio strobes), we received some questions on the type of backdrop we use for our solid white background. So today, we wanted to give you our opinions on what has worked best for us!
There are quite a few options when you are looking to get a clean, crisp white background for your photos. To be honest, it’s not a look we go for often, as we prefer to shoot outdoors and in natural light, but we need it on a regular basis for some of our branding photography. Some photographers utilize vinyl and others prefer special fabrics that do a great job with holding color like muslin cloth. Depending on the situation, there are also white pop-up backdrops that are available when you just need to get a headshot. They fold up like a windshield reflector (for the Arizonan’s who know what that is!) and are easy to manipulate.
In most situations, we’ve needed to take full body photos, so pop-up backgrounds wouldn’t work for us. Vinyl is another popular backdrop material. It is very resistant to messes and is easy to clean up! The major downside to vinyl is that it is extremely heavy! It’s not the kind of thing you want to tote across town to a location! Muslin cloth was also not a good solution for us. The characteristics of Muslin make it wrinkle incredibly easily – like no matter what! Most photographers who use Muslin cloth use different textured cloths that don’t show the wrinkles, but in our case we needed a solid and smooth background that would hold up to use, not wrinkle easily, and be easy to transport.
White rolls of seamless paper have been the big winner for us! They are relatively light, especially given the lengths and sizes we typically use. They are durable and made of heavyweight paper that lasts throughout the entire session. The non-reflective properties of the white seamless paper make it a perfect option for our work. We typically use the 107 inch wide rolls that are 150 feet long for our sessions that require full body length photos. Even at that size, the rolls are light enough that Erica can carry them on her own! While we typically shoot on white, there are so many more colors available in seamless paper that other materials like vinyl.
The other benefit to using seamless paper for your background is the price point! Since the backdrop is made of paper, we cut the portion that was stepped on off at the end of the session and throw it away. Usually the floor section is marked with shoe prints and dirt, but the low cost of the material make it easy to part with small sections at a time. 🙂
We hope this helps, friends! Have you worked with other backdrops in your experience? Let us know how they worked for you below – we’d love to hear from you!
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