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Vincenzo

Shooting the Chroma key: Lighting and shooting to strip your subject off green backgrounds effortlessly

Part 2 of 3:


The first thing to take into account is that photoshop uses tools that select based on similarity, you must have an evenly lit background if you want to be able to select it and remove it in photoshop effectively.  Since the extraction is based on selecting the green screen, you want to keep that green as close to the same tone as possible.

I want the chroma to be the same f-stop as my main light.  This keeps everything nice and bright and means that my camera settings are really easy.  I’m using a 9 foot background and one light on either side to light it. The lights are about 4 to 6 feet from the background.  To make the light super even you’ll need to have the lights crossing each other (your right light is lighting the left side of you background and vice versa) this gives the light a little time to spread out keeping hot spots from appearing on the background.  Our background lighting set up looked like this from camera position:

You want to loosely set-up your lights and then start metering.  Thats right, dust off your meter and start checking the background.  I use f/8 so that I have enough DOF for my subject (like I said earlier, my background and my main light will be the same intensity) so if I want to shoot at f/8 then I will be tweaking my lights until the center, left, and right of the chroma read f/8.  If one side is brighter you willl need to do one of the following; 

-change the angle of your lights 

-move your lights father away 

-adjust the  power of the lights

It will require a combo of all three on both lights to get an evenly exposed chroma. Do tests!  Do them before you go on location.  Its much easier to set-up under pressure if you know the approximate set-up ahead of time.  This will cut your set-up time in half and your cuss words will be reduced by about 72% (yes I stole that cuss word bit from Zack Arias ...... get over it). Speaking of the One Light Master there are some space requirements that we need to cover.  I do the basics, if you want to see where I took my info from the link is Zack Arias’ multi-part studio set-up blog post.   A 20x20 foot space is what you need, due to our initial tests and the space constraints of our client we asked for 10x15, this made relative sense to us as our background is 9 feet wide and lights are pretty small on each side.  Now..... most of you are like cool, that works, right? NOPE! As we realized the average light stand has a footprint of about 3.5-4 feet (call it 4 for mathematical simplicity).  About 2 feet of that is going to overlap your background stands, BUT 2 feet won’t.  So you realistically looking at about 9 + 4 feet (2 on each side) that 13’s. Not 9 like we budgeted for, luckily there was a bit of extra room for us to work with, 15-20 feet would have kept the profanity in check better. 

As far as length goes there is no question, you need 20 feet.  When lighting the background, that light (which is green because its bouncing off a green source) is bouncing back and hitting the subject.  This will give the subject (especially their hair) a green cast on there edges, causing you a lot of grief in the extraction.  Keep this a minimum too, move your subject at least 10 feet from the background.  Do a meter reading of the back of the subjects' head without your main and fill light on   The light bouncing off the background and hitting your subject should be at least 2-3 stops under your main light.  If your main is f/8, the bounce back should be under f/4, preferably f/2.8.

The other benefit of moving your subject off of  the background is that the lights on the subject no longer affect the background. This keeps those lights from creating hot spots or shadows that will interfere with your extraction.  The lighting is up to you I like small softboxs in this situation.  This project was clean soft light, fill light above camera position high, and main light camera left, high and on a 45 degree angle to the subject.  The fill lights power was set a half stop under the main. The main was f/8 (the same as the background so that everything’s copacetic) this makes the fill about 5 and a half (photo translation about f/6.3).  The benefit of this set-up is if some of that green light from the background gets on to your subject (which it should not) the soft even light from the softboxs will wash the green out.  As well soft boxs are very directional and keep  the main and fill lights off the background.  This is hard to do with umbrellas because they throw light everywhere.  Our fill was about 5-7 feet off the subjects position in a direct line away from the background, the main was the same distance on a 45 degree angle (don’t get out your protractor, eye ball it, this is not critical) from the subject.  Nice clean, corporate and easy to extract.  Go as crazy as you want there is no perfect light set-up for this, the important part is that you background is even and that your subject is not getting green spill bouncing back onto them.

Next week I’ll hit on:

Shooting Tethered: its not magic, just orginization

Photoshop: Templates, templates, templates....

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.

Bellows Portrait

Well its midnight, my laptop is at 13% battery and I'm just about ready to hit the hay. Just posted a portrait for a client to view, I figured I should toss it up here as well. I haven't posted anything in a while so this serves the dual purposed of getting me out of that rut and showing off some new stuff! Wicked! Alright here it goes, we did a family portrait for the Bellows and a couple quick shots of their eldest daughter Kristen to update their wall portraits:

We also did a photo of their four daughters:

It was a Blast! Can't wait until my next session with the Bellows! Tons of fun at their house.

Vincenzo

Yannik

Just finished a fun shoot with a really talented graffiti artist from paris. He found an accordion, which made and excellent prop and we ran with it. Yannik works with airbrush alot and has a great deal of skill. Some really interesting stuff. Check him out HERE! He teaches art to people of all ages and spends alot of his time giving back top the art community.

Vince

Busy Week

It's been CRAZY all week. Went out to do some night skyline stuff on monday, didn't really like what I came back with. Looked into some HRD tone-mapping programs, I really like PhotoMatrix PRO, its got some really interesting options.

Chase Jarvis came to Toronto on thursday. What an AMAZING guy! He's a huge advertising photographer, and the most down to earth guy I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. He stuck around after the actual "seminar" and shot the shit with us, sat down had a beer and let everyone who wanted to stay ask questions and hang out. I still can believe had sat there and had a beer with Chase Jarvis. He really gets you pumped up about going out and making the kind of photos you really want to be making.

With Chase's motivation behind me I went back out on last night and tried my Toronto landscape again. Came away with some really cool stuff, check it out at the Not Paid Work Blog.

Take a look at Chases blog at ChaseJarvis.com/blog , his stuff is AWSOME!

Vince

Chase Jarvis and Joe McNally

I've been off in crazy photographer world for the last few weeks. I jumped head first into both of Joe McNally's books and his blog. I've also been watching and reading everything from Chase Jarvis as well, these two guys are putting out SOOOOOO much information its amazing. Looking into some new small flash options, perhaps a ski snowboard shoot this winter. I shot some stuff for Patricia last week that turned out really well, we tried out some of the new small flash gear I've been working with. This is some of what we got:

I've been posting some work to a new blog thats just started called "Not Paid Work", its a few photogs from toronto who post more personal or creative work. Check it out! Comment if you can!

Vince