Backdrops / backgrounds.....What do you use? Home painted heavy canvas, expensive custom painted supposedly one of a kind purchased from a famous backdrop / background company.
So do you get tired of what is hanging from the Backdrop support.
Wouldn't it be great if you could have tons of flexibility and creativity in the backdrop department without the expense and storage of dozens of backdrops.
Many years ago I was just starting out and I had no room for more than 1 backdrop rolled on a homemade roller attached to a living room wall. So I was looking at all the Savage Paper rolls and also at the painted and dyed backdrops and I wanted to add color to them. I had seen color spots on photos in various Photo mags and went on a hunt to find out how it was done. What I found was these NY and LA photogs were using very strong floods (1K and up watts)and or strobes (1K wattseconds and up ) with colored gels taped over the front of the lamps.....Hmmmm but no one was telling what color backdrop......so I started asking at the local camera shops aboutr backdrops and coloring them and was told to use something like Thunder Grey and to buy from Threatrical Services Inc here in Wichita. So off to TSI and purchased a roll of Savage Thunder Grey.....a little darker than 18% grey and it did not hold the light like I wanted it to do but it was easy to burn it with my back lights to a very near pure white and a few pastel colors when I used dark colored gels......just did not have the punch I wanted.
By now I was reading books by Famed Glamour Photographer Peter Gowland and one of the books had contact info in i to contact him with questions....Hmmm
So I called him and asked about this coloring of backdrops and was told that the best color to HOLD other colors was black, as it absorbed the color and would stay saturated with it....when other backdrop colors such as the greys and whites would reflect it off and the colors would be very muted.
Back off to TSI, I go to see about Muslin......at this time it was ~$2.50 a running yd.....so I bought 10 yards of 9 foot wide bleached muslin.......then I went to a damaged freight building materials store and bought 1 gallon of exterior black latex house paint.
Now the fun begins.....I tacked the muslin down on the front deck fo my rented house and started rolling the paint on after slightly diluting it with water, at first I was trying to be very cautious of doing my rolling in perfectly straight lines overlapping by no more than an inch or two..........but realized it looked terrible to me and then got a slightly haphazard motion going and when it was done it looked good....solid deep black.....took it 2 hot summer days to dry due to laying flat on a wooden deck.
Time to test it....laid it over a couch hit it with the light from a Paul C Buff White Lightning 5000 Strobe with a magent gel over it.....took about 3 shots with strobe approx 4 feet away at full, 1/2 and 1/3 power to see the difference and then ran the film to Wallys World for quik cheap processing.......
Eureka!!!!!!!!! It worked....fantastically saturated color fading off to black.
I could now say I had hundreds of available backdrops/ backgrounds by painting with lights.....this afforded me to be able to store the gels in a smaller place that what even 3 or 4 or more actual muslin backdrops could be stored in.....the main black drop cost me ~$30 for muslin and paint and the gels at the time were ~$2.50 (about 1/2 of todays price).
After using the gels for a while and having tape stuck to the relectors of the stobes, the strobes started looking like crap....then I ran across a really neat photographic accessory company called SPIRATONE (now out of business) and they had a really cool item called a "Z" frame.....a gel holder made to attach to a light stand just beneath the strobe.....this little gem holds the gel right against the front of the strobe using clips to hold the gels .....Awwwww no more duct or maksing tape adhearing it self to the painted surface of the strobe reflector......this is great.
Using gels like this can be quite creative if you allow your imagination to just run wild......Rosco gels( actually all gels brands can be taped topgether, Ijust happen to prefer Rosco) can be cut and taped together (using scotch tape) either in straight lines of designs to have multi colrs from one light and there is nearly no end to what can be done this way.
I almost forgot.......I like working with more than 1 back light....my minimum is 2......one for each side of the backdrop / background.
