Back in Black

Those of a similar age and musical persuasion to myself will probably recognise the title of this blog post as an album by Australian rock band AC/DC released in 1980 (and not to be confused with the Amy Winehouse album Back to Black). However this is not about music but about creating studio photographs with the background in black (see what I did there?)

Up to now I have used a black cloth on a roll which hangs behind the subject (a common enough method of creating a background in a photographic studio). The problem that I have is that because of the subject size I am photographing, and the size of Studio 19, I cut mine down to a more usable width. The flip side to this is that the hanging material doesn’t have as much weight and so doesn’t always hang completely straight and creases don’t pull out. This leads to additional post-processing.

Some time ago I purchased a 18% neutral-grey background to use for creating composite images. This is of a pop-up variety, in that it folds into a 65cm circle for storage but ‘pops-up’ into a 2m x 1.5m stretched oval when unpacked. It’s a bit ungainly, especially in a relatively small room, but does give a much better appearance (although it takes a special knack to get it to fold back up again).

I therefore decided to purchase a similar pop-up background but this time with black on one side and white on the other – thus negating the need for the hanging backdrops at all.

The reason for the black background is that I want to explore chiaroscuro photography in more depth. Chiaroscuro literally means “light-dark” in Italian and is a style commonly associated with the artist Caravaggio (1571-1610) who painted scenes in high contrast with a well-lit subject but a very dark background. Keep checking back to see how I get on.