starting out - recommend background

Hi,

I'm just starting out, and I got this photo shoot of kids and parents graduation shots on location (at a local high school) of a Kumon tutor school. I like some suggestions of a inexpensive background. I saw on Amazon some of those "cowboy" units and I was thinking of adding either a gray or brown muslin background.

Here my equipment: 2 580ex flashes, 1 430ex flash, 2 umbrellas, 2 7 ft light stands (for umbrellas and flashes) and off-camera flash cord.

Thanks!

Light gray is nice in that you can sometimes get away without using a hair light. With dark drops people with darker hair often blend into the background at the hairline. Going gray mitigates this to some degree. A white drop eliminates that, but then you usually need to light it to make it appear white so gray a nice compromise. I like gray better than brown for a couple reasons, the first being more neutral in terms of color conflicts and the second being the degree to which you can underexpose the background in comparison to the subject without appearing murky. Underexposed gray is just darker gray..

I started out with a neutral gray savage background from BH.

Zack Arias (zarias.net) has a great tutorial on doing a white seamless background. he discusses light falloff and shows you how with a single white backdrop, you can get any shade from white all the way to black. from there, just throw gels on your backdrop flash and you'll have a really versatile setup.

I have a thunder grey paper background but for your purposes I would go with light grey as well.

aaron.dunlap wrote in post #10817916
Zack Arias (zarias.net) has a great tutorial on doing a white seamless background. he discusses light falloff and shows you how with a single white backdrop, you can get any shade from white all the way to black. from there, just throw gels on your backdrop flash and you'll have a really versatile setup.

You don't want to try white seemless thing for what OP is looking for.

I would look at mottled gray which with gels can be made into other colors.

OP - If you need some local help, pm me.

chantu wrote in post #10817288
Hi,

and off-camera flash cord.

Thanks!

I would look into getting away from the cord and move to some wireless triggers

Thanks a bunch guys in the input. It looks like gray is the simplest thing to do starting out. My daughter's senior portraits actually had a brown background which looked pretty good, but as gonzogolf mentioned if I don't get the exposure right, it may not look too good.

Also, how far away should the subject be away from the background? Thanks!

KenVP wrote in post #10818210
I would look into getting away from the cord and move to some wireless triggers

I'll be 2/3 wireless . I'll use my off-camera cord to one of the 580's as a "master", and the other two flashes would slave off this.