Backdrops for photography

[Mick_in_Switzerland]

Dear Ragnar,

That looks superb. Please can you take a picture from the side so that we can see how you set it up.

Best Regards

Mick

[Cubs]

Hot damn Ragnar, that's superb.

I use the old curved piece of paper trick. It's black rough paper I lightly sprayed with white undercoat in a patchy, misty effect. It's a nice neutral and versatile background for pretty much anything.

[Wirelizard]

If you just want simple gradient backgrounds, many years ago now I created a PDF file with eight different backgrounds in it.

It's downloadable here: http://www.warbard.ca/2011/01/11/gradient-backgrounds-for-photography/

Set up for Letter-size paper like we weird North Americans use, but they're simple vector gradients so should scale cleanly to any size of paper you're able to print on.

[Doug ex-em4]

Nice work, Ragnar - very impressive.

Doug

[Ragnar]

Thanks for the kind words lads.  I truly did not mean to hijack the thread.   

@Mick_in_Switzerland: sorry, this was a while ago and no, I did not take any pictures from the side. 

Basically, I used blu-tac to hold the print on the wall with the wargames table up against it.  The bottom edge of the picture is actually below the table for this shot.  I then blended in the edge of the table with bushes.  Note that my riverbed was painted with dirty browns and greens, so I think this helps it to look convincing.

[Fitz]

This is the setup I use for photographing my models.

The shell of the stage is a cheap translucent plastic storage bin, lined inside with white cardboard.

I use three cool-white LED lamps, two from above and a lower-powered one providing some frontal fill lighting. The LED lamps are excellent for my purposes, as they're very bright but emit very little heat, so I can have the bulbs sitting right on the plastic bin without melting it or setting anything on fire — they do get a little bit warm, but not very, and the lights are never on long enough to cause an issue. They're not true daylight lamps, but they're fairly close in tone, close enough for digital editing in any case.

I have a pair of mirror tiles leaning against either side of the stage to bounce around a bit more of the light coming from overhead. The cards in front and at the back of the stage are for colour and tone calibration when I'm editing the images on my computer; they get cropped out of the final images.

I prefer to use a neutral grey backdrop most of the time, but I also use a white or black one. Occasionally I'll use a more decorative stage setup, but not often.

I always use the tripod. My camera these days is a Nikon D3500 DSLR with an 18 to 140 mm zoom lense. I don't yet have a flash for it, apart from the built-in one; my old Nikon TTL Speedlight turns out to be precisely the wrong model to be compatible with any modern camera. Hey-ho.

[Mick_in_Switzerland]

@Fitz

I think the colour cards are a good idea.

Where did you get the colour and grey scale cards from?

Did you make them yourself?

Regards


Mick

[Hammers]

The cards in front and at the back of the stage are for colour and tone calibration when I'm editing the images on my computer; they get cropped out of the final images.

Fitz, van you tell us a little bit more about this?

[Fitz]

I think the colour cards are a good idea.
Where did you get the colour and grey scale cards from?
Did you make them yourself?

I did make them myself. The three-tone white-grey-black card is just paint, with the middle grey matched from a photographic scanner calibration target image I've had for many years. The colour swatch card is printed from my CMYK laser printer; it's not good enough for scientific accuracy, but it's good enough for my purposes.

Having them both in the image field serves two purpose: firstly, it gives the camera's automatic white-balance something to average against, so the stored photo starts out with less likelihood of a colour cast created by a predominance of one hue or another in the scene, and secondly they provide target points of more or less pure hue that you can match to in digital post-processing in whatever software you might be using.

When all of the colour correction has been done, then the swatch cards are cropped out of the final image. Fortunately, most cameras (and phones) these days shoot at a high enough resolution that you can easily discard three quarters of a photograph, and still have an image large enough that it needs to be resized even further down for on-screen display.

[Mick_in_Switzerland]

Thank-you Fitz

[YPU]

The colour swats are a common method for calibrating cameras, you can get crazy expensive wallet-sized ones which have specific software that can take any image with the color checker in it and adjust it to make it "true color"  Luckily if you just google colour checker you can find plenty of DIY ways to do it as well.

[redrevuk]

If you're OK with painted scenics, Jon Hodgson Maps on Patreon has a subscription available (I think $3 a month). Very nice artwork, and one month's subs will get you the whole back catalogue.

[James Morris]

If you're OK with painted scenics, Jon Hodgson Maps on Patreon has a subscription available (I think $3 a month). Very nice artwork, and one month's subs will get you the whole back catalogue.

Seconded.  Here’s a few of his backgrounds in use. They are more aimed st fantasy, but have some historical uses as well.

[Codsticker]

Inspired by some of the backdrops in this thread and others, I decided to improve the one I had by adding blue sky and expanding the clouds.

Just craft and house paint on raw gyproc I had laying around.

I wanted it fairly big as I make a lot of terrain.

[Mick_in_Switzerland]

@Codsticker,

Your backdrop looks very good and practical. I will try to make something similar.