Here are some shots I took of Los Angeles guitarist and bassist Alex Rentumis. Alex is involved in a wide range of projects including writing and recording solo material, Bill and Al’s Acoustic Adventure, Crematorium, The Brian Fox Band, and Trinity Test. Check out Alex Rentumis on Myspace.

I came across a great DIY seamless background tutorial on the blog of Atlanta photographer Zack Arias that can help you get a great studio look for a couple hundred dollars and a few strobes. Seeing as I currently don’t have either of those things, I had to go the old route of improvising to get close enough and faking it the rest of the way.

Set up here was two $10 clip lights w/ 1oow Reveal bulbs. Diffusser was a tupperware container with a layer of one-ply toilet paper taped over. The main light was clipped to a microphone stand and kept close to the face, mostly in a safe “Rembrandt” angle with a few side-light shots just to spice it up. Second light was left hard and moved back.

I’d be able to get away with low-light portraits with my 50mm f/1.8, but having to squeeze in guitar necks meant having to shoot most of these with my kit lens and having to stay at 18-24mm to stay at f/3.5 wide open. I was still shooting around iso800 at 1/80.

The white backgrounds are a sheet taped to the wall. The second light was low and behind Alex, hitting as much of the sheet as I could while also keeping him as close to the wall as I could. I had to open the shades to get a little ambient to play with, but mixing in cool daylight was a compromise I knew I’d have to deal with and work around later. I shot these in aperture priority mode to make sure I got a good exposure without going over. To blast out backgrounds, I used a curves adjustment layer to blow out highlights, a soft brush to mask Alex back to normal leaving a little extra on his edges, merged down, then went around him dodging out highlights with a medium sized soft brush at exposure of 8-12%. This is faster than it sounds and you can be fairly imprecise. Here’s a before and after:

The black backgrounds are an air mattress leaned against the wall with a black comforter draped over. Since ambient was the enemy, I could kill the shades and not have color problems, but that also meant having to squeeze out more light by shooting close and wide and keeping the main light close and contrasty. So be it. The second light was taped to the top of the air mattress angled down to hit his head and shoulders to pop him off the background. To help keep the main light off the background, I put black tape on the left side of the tupperware as a gobo.

Here, I wanted to get Alex a few feet away from the wall to help drop the background into darkness, but that meant catching the glare from the rim light. When I hit a bad angle, I just held out one hand to block the direct light from the lens and it worked fine. Already knowing what I was working with and having the backlight confusing things, I switched to manual mode and tried to watch my histograms. In Photoshop, I used a similar approach only adjusting the blackpoint, masking, and then burning shadows. Here’s a before and after: