Lighting a back ground evenly

I have a question currently I'm using two bare strobes with the reflector to light my back ground. There no real issue other than at the extreme top and bottom there is a slight light drop off. The seamless is about 7'.8" in height. If I crop the photo I don't see any drop off.

The strobes are about 6' from the back ground.

I was curious would mounting two medium soft box 24"x36" on the strobe lights end up lighting it more even from top to bottom compared to the bare 8" reflector from the strobe?

Should I buy two 12x56" strip box to light the back ground instead of the 24x36" soft box.

Thanks.

I often use two 40" umbrellas, one on each side to light my backgrounds.

You want the widest angle for greatest coverage but you also want to drop the level of the hot spot so that you get a more even light with the greatest coverage. At close range this becomes even tougher to do because you also have to deal with the rapid falloff, and gradients will reveal themselves quickly.

With smaller modifiers you're going to have to have them at a greater distance from the background than you would with a large one, so you also have to consider how much room you have and the intended subject position. You may have to use flags or gobos to isolate the subject area from the background lights and you also have to watch for wrap, ghosting and a loss of contrast from light that returns from the background.

Robert, the way my main room I shoot is setup that I have exactly 2 strobes at each side pointing at the back ground 6' away. I cannot move the strobes any further back as I don't want any spill from the back ground strobes on the subjects.

From there the space is limited that the model stand another 2 to 3 feet ahead of the strobes.

My thoughts, is that a 2x 24x36 or 2x 12x56" soft box has a lot more lighting dispersion area than a 8" reflector.

Won't the soft boxes light the background more evenly than how I'm currently lighting up the back ground with the bare 8" reflector. It would be nice if I had more distance to move the strobes much further back but I don't.

The reason why I'm not using two umbrella is that the umbrella will protrude into the back ground.

I use large softboxes to light my background. In my experience, softboxes will light the background much more evenly than reflectors. An added benfit is that the softer light from the softboxes makes wrinkles in the background much less apparent.

The reflector will have a much more intense hot spot so yes, I agree that using something like a softbox is better in a small space than reflectors.

Regardless of which modifier you use, the same concepts and issues apply. The more you can control and isolate the background lighting from the subject lighting and the most even light across the background will give you the best results.

With softboxes you need to feather the lights perfectly so that the falloff from one and the crossover from the over give you the same readings in the center as the edges. At the same time you have to think about the angle that you use for the background lights so that you're not creating a huge amount of return at the back of the subject.