Some help needed, pretty please!

Hi everyone,
I am hoping to get some advice from you guys.....

I have a Canon EOS300D with a speedlite flash.

I am wanting to take some photos of my kids using a white sheet as the background to get that bright kind of look, like these photos.

http://www.flickr.com …ts/721575943439​74893/show
I am wanting to either shoot indoors or outdoors.

Can anyone give me advice on how to get these kind of shots please .... I have PCS2 also.

Also, apart from using the portrait mode, how do I take a close up pic with the background blurred?

Thanks in advance !

You'll need a fast lens. The cheapest one to try is the 50f1.8 it goes for abut $75 this side of the pond. You can also increase the distance of the BG relative to the subject and the f/stop. The larger the aperature (smaller the number) the more blur the BG will be, its also refer to as Bokeh!!!

Totally confused !!

To get those shots you really need to learn about lighting! Basically the easiest way to get that look is with with three lights. One key light, one fill light and one background light and make the background light two stops brighter than the key!

To blur the background on closeups all you need to do is give a lot of distance between the subject and the background. The closer you are to the subject the easier to blur the background. Your F stop will also play a part in this and to get a blured backround with the whold head in focus I recomend f8 but going lower will allow you to control over bluring the background from greater distances from the subject. I hope this helps, but I am tired, so it probably makes no sense

So with my camera I have no hope of getting results like these?

of course you do! The lighting might be a bit of a challenge with what you have but not impossible. You can use a window as the key light and then any form of reflector for fill and with PS2 dodge the background!

I plan on getting some white sheeting soon and I'll have a go. I have a very brightly lit room, fingers crossed! If I get some half decent shots I'll post them on here....i hope

Its not so much the camera its the lens!

here is one taken a DRebel (300D) w/ a Sigma 24-70 f2.8 EX @ 52mm f/2.8 no flash:

http://i23.photobucket​.com …%20uploads/CRW_​5761PS.jpg

Wow nice shot (cute kid too) Ok I'll have to do some shopping.

It's going to be very hard to get your white background white and still get the exposure correct on your kids. The reason is that to expose for the background so that it is a nice clean white you are going to over expose anything in front of it. Think of the light leaving your flash and traveling across a room. If you have something a foot in front of the flash it is real bright on that object. If you move the object 1 foot futher away but leave the light the same strength (now 2 feet from the flash), the light isn't going to be quit as bright on that object. If you move the object another foot away, again, leaving the flash the same strength (this object will be 3 feet away from the flash) the light falling on it will be even less because the light has spread out as it travels across the room. If you increase the flash so that it is the same brightness at 3 feet as it is at 1 foot from the flash, you have now made the light even brighter at those spots at 2 feet and 1 foot in front of the flash. This would be the same with lighting the background correctly. The subject in front of the background is going to get more light than the background, causing it to be over exposed.

This is why it is very hard to to get a white background and a properly exposed subject with one light. The background will come out gray with one light. You really need two lights, one shines on the background and exposes it for the proper amount and one light shines on the subject and gives the right amount of light for it. You can have light from the subject spill over to the background but you usually do not want light from the background to spill back onto your subject.

What most people do that only have one light is expose for the subject and make the background white in Photoshop. Which is not that easy to do and make it look natural either.

You could mix sunlight and your flash together, the flash lighting the background and the sunlight coming through a window lighting your subject, but that can take a little bit of practice to get them working together as well. You can do it with your camera, but don't get discouraged if it doesn't come out like your examples did. Those were probably taken with 2 or 3 lights.

Mike

Learn a little bit more about exposure before you jump into studio lighting with backgrounds and such...

The best $ you'll ever spend for your camera:

http://www.amazon.com …5-2779238?ie=UTF8&s=book​s

Post your shots here, ask questions, get help! You've gotta start somewhere and that's usually at the beginning

every time i try to view this http://www.flickr.com …/xander_...3439​74893/show
my IE crashes??

it's a bad link in Firefox.

The images in the link are NOT good examples of clothing ... don't do that. They have pink, red, and blue on a hi-key white background which is wrong. Pose your subjects wearing white or off white with no patterns.

One suggestion was to overexpose the subjects ... WRONG. Good hi-key is a matter of good exposure and a fine line difference between how much light is on the background compared to that on the subjects.

If you are pretty new, I suggest that you get a handle on low-key first. And when you do try hi-key ... make sure you have at least 3 to 4 studio strobes. And instead of a "sheet", but yourself some bleached or unbleached muslin material from a fabric store. Most stores sell it 9 feet wide ... buy about 21 feet long. Then don't pull it tight ... drape it so you have some nice draping look to it.