After doing quite a few extremely dark shadowy images for La Figa, lately I have been on a bit of a high key kick. As I mentioned in my last blog post, when shooting with white seamless paper as a background you have two basic choices as to how to light it – leave the paper visible (i.e. it appears as off white or even very light grey), or blast it with enough light so that it blows out to pure white. There is no “right” way – just a matter of taste.

In terms of shooting, visible is harder in a way, because it can be challenging to get an even shade of white across the entire background. With pure white you don’t have to worry so much about evening it out, once it is overexposed it doesn’t much matter by how far. On the other hand, it makes judging the exposure by the histogram on your camera trickier – most of your image is one big blown highlight.

Recently I have been liking the pure white effect better. This lighting – which is typically used in fashion photography – is also a lot of fun to use with kids (it is not just fine art erotica around here). Here are some recent samples: