Chroma Gear: What we used, what we didn’t use, and what you can use.

Part 1 of 3:

The chroma key shoot was a SUCCESS! I put together a post to walk you through the process of how this all came together. As I got into it I realized this was going to take longer than I had intended so I will describe the process to you in my next 3 posts. 1. Gear 2. Shooting and lighting 3. Photoshop . Heres it goes....


*Please note: I was not the photographer on this project, I was the setup and lighting consultant and ran the photoshop extraction and work flow.*

The idea presented was to photograph the employees of a company on a chroma key (green background) in small groups as one of the booths during the company's yearly launch party.  I then extracted the images and dropped them onto a magazine cover with the company's logo and theme built into it.  Kinda cool eh?  I wanna work for these guys!

The original tests for this shoot were done with 2 SB 800’s as background lights and 2 SB 900’s, 1 as the main light and 1 as the fill light. Upon further communication with the client it was discovered that we would be shooting in a hotel lobby as that was the only place in the hotel that met our space requirements (we will cover that later).  As we now knew we would have access to power we scrapped the stobist plan and went with 4 studio lights ( I use Alien Bee's B1600). Either way will work but if you're going to be shooting for 12 hours (as we did) then corded lights will remove 2 key issues from your day. A) they recycle much faster  B) you don't have to have someone running around pulling out dead batteries and putting them on charge.  I recommend anything 600 ws+ as the groups are small and only one line deep, this leaves plenty or DOF at f/5.6 - f/8.  Work within your budget.  4 strobes will do just fine if you're shooting under 100 shots or you don't mind changing and charging batteries.

In this type of situation people will be around you all the time.  The better your stands are the less you have to worry about someone knocking over your lights (I've got these, there not fancy and air cushioned but there big and heavy and won fall over).  Tape down your cords!  As photographers it is second nature, but most people don't expect a light cord to be running across the lobby floor.  Tape it down, don't risk anything.  Your gear is expensive, you have to protect it.

It is very important to have a way to trigger your lights . More important to me is that the general public are not tripping my lights.  If you are in a public place using optical slaves really sucks! Personally I use radiopoppers, they are not as expensive as Pocket Wizards (you know they're fancy because I capitalized the P and W) but they get the job done well and I don't think I’ve ever had them miss a shot.  Its one of those things where you have to buy the best you can afford.  There are items you can skimp on in this business like the quality of your duck tape.  Lights, stands, lenses and cameras are not on that list and in my opinion triggers shouldn't be either.  I shoot with alien bees and Nikon strobes so RadioPoppers work really well for me.  If you can afford pocket wizards and need the features they provide then go for it.  Do your research, look at your needs and buy what will give you the best quality for the price and make sure it meets all of your needs.  The worst feeling is rationalizing buying an inferior product and then 3 months later shelling out more money to buy what you should have gotten in the first place and waiting 3 weeks for it to ship to you while you use the old ones that miss ever 5th shot!

You're gonna need a few things to modify your lights.  We used umbrellas for the background lights (45 inchs I believe, I use these westcott, I like westcott, but you don't have to use westcott) one for each light.  Softboxes for the subject, a 28 inch and a 20 inch......maybe.... one was bigger than the other, the sizes are not super critical, just light them even. I’ll cover the when? why? where? and how?  I set up the lights in the next segment.

We used a paper background.  You can get fabric ones but I like paper, its easy to work with and if it gets dirty or ripped you can just cut it off and roll out some more.  Why are we using a chroma key?  ‘Cause all the cool kids are doing it?  Nope, this is the easiest way to get someone off a background and onto another file fast.  It isn't perfect.  I hear a lot of complaints about the fact that you have to go in and clean up after it in some cases.  Well here's how I feel about it.  The number one reason that most people have to go in a fix issues from a chroma key is because they put there subject too bloody close to the giant green screen and then green light bounced off and got all over their subject.  What did you think was going to happen if the subject is a foot and a half from the background?  Do it right and you won't have to spend 45 minutes cutting them out and another 20 minutes blending them into the new shot.

I’ll continue with the lighting in the second segment.  Shooting the Chroma key: Lighting and shooting correctly make your life easier later.