Backdrops in Photography

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm Mark Bowers from bowersphotography.com in Utah and we're talking about backgrounds. Backgrounds take, place an important part in doing portraiture. It describes what you're doing. What it's supposed to be is stay in the background. Probably the most important thing is you want to keep backgrounds in the background by adding some distance between your model and the photographer. And I like at least six feet between my backgrounds and whoever I'm shooting, mostly because I can get the background to be just a little bit soft and fuzzy and also I don't have funny reflections on the background or funny shadows. Another thing that's really important is I like a variety of backgrounds. We do white for illustrative type things, Norman Rockwell kind of style, we use rock, we use different arches, we use painted backgrounds, we try to do as much variety as we can. It makes our customers very happy with what we're doing. This particular background I bought from a background painter and I just painted a little bit of it myself just to adjust it to what I wanted. It's painted with a little bit of flat paint that's had a lot of water mixed with it. The rock was made by a friend who does rocks for a living. The white I paint myself and the thing with white is I have to keep re-painting it about every month. And I'd like to show you the, what we do with the sides, how we built the curve in the white. What I've done here is I've done a base where we glued one by fours on the floor and one by fours on the wall, and then we did half inch plywood on a forty-five degree angle for a strong base because sometimes there's people that'll just walk on it even though you don't want to, and then I took one piece of Masonite and it's the thin quarter, or thin eighth inch Masonite and bent it and glued it to the wall and the floor. And then I took another Masonite and overlapped it completely to give it double the strength. And now you can stand right on it and it's very strong and it hasn't broken yet. It's been here for eight years."