White Background / Studio photography with one flash.

In this post I’m going to walk you through how, with only one external flash, in a normal room, you can manage to make a photo that looks like it was shot in a studio. Hopefully you will get a better grasp of light and how it works in the process. You’re going to need to know how to use your camera in manual mode. This post is about light,  not “the basics of using a camera,” and you’re going to need a way to fire your flash off-camera. Go here for details on how to fire any recent Nikon flash off-camera. The rest of you will want to go here for tons of different ways. If you’re on a tiny budget and you don’t mind a little hit to reliability then I would recommend this4 Channel Wireless Hot Shoe Flash Trigger & Receiver Set for a quick way to get started.
If you’ve got those things covered then lets move on.

In keeping with the low-budget theme of this post, I’ll be shooting in pretty much the most low-budget place possible:

As you can see, this is about the furthest thing from a studio around. There’s really not much to work with in here, so we’ll be shooting in front of the door. Its sorta off-white but its close enough for our purposes. If we just stick the subject in front of the door, using just the ambient light in the room, we get something like this:

The background has the shadow of the subject on it, and even the parts unaffected by the shadow are a murky grey. The light doesn’t flatter the subject at all either, there are nasty shadows, bags under her eyes and no catch lights.

So here is where flash comes in. For these shots I’ll be using one Nikon sb-600 fired by the pop-up on a d90 to keep it simple.

Basically, I;m going to put my flash behind the subject, and below waist level, pointing up at the part of the door directly behind the subject, like so:

I’m not going to post the specific settings that I used for my flash here, as the settings will vary for each situation. The key is to set the flash power up until the background goes white and the shadow of the subject goes away, but not too high as to cause flare. So play around until you find a happy medium. Since the flash is pointed at the background instead of the subject, you’re going to use primarily the ambient light in the room to light the subject. Still, you can reasonably expect some light from the flash bouncing around the room to provide a little fill and lighten up those shadows on the subjects face.

This is what I’m getting at this stage:

So, we’ve fixed the background problem, its white, theres no more shadow on it. Its getting better. If you’re really lazy then you could stop here, but I’m going to experiment with some cheap ways to make it even better.

The background is fine, what needs work now is the light hitting the subject. Right now its just the ambient light helped out a little by spill from the background flash. In this situation it’s not THAT bad, but in many cases the ambient light isn’t bright enough, is to harsh, or in the wrong place, or even an entirely different color. I want something I can replicate reliably. Ideally you would bring up your shutter speed to stop the ambient light from affecting your photo and run another flash through an umbrella or softbox onto the subject for a nice soft key light.

The problem is you’ve only got one off-camera flash unit, and thats already being used. This is where we need some creative thinking.

The rest should be done tomorrow. Let me know what you think of it so-far.