General Purpose Seamless Paper ... What Color?

I want to hang a roll of seamless paper up. Ideally I'd get a few rolls with several colors, but for now, just one. My main purpose is to shoot video (short videos for my law firm). Any idea what color background is most pleasing yet professional for business? Light gray? Dark Gray? An ivory color?

Since I have it, I might as well shoot some portraits as well. Any suggestions on first colors would be greatly appreciated.

Do you have any lights? id go with light gray.

No lights, yet. It'll be in my garage so I'm going to test with natural light (heh) but if you have any suggestions for cheapo lights I'm all ears. Maybe some cheap clamp lights with the CFL's. I do have a speedlite 580exII but obviously I can't use that for video.

thunder gray or white! white will look gray anyway if you're not lighting it properly to get pure white.

hawk911 wrote in post #11816302
thunder gray or white! white will look gray anyway if you're not lighting it properly to get pure white.

I second the thunder Gray paper. It works wonders you can light it or not and get different shades all the way to black. It also reacts well to gelling strobes only holding color in smaller areas. I also like Coco Brown it is nice and earthy and very usable with a lot of skin tones.

White, for sure...you can go from white to grey to black with it as well as use gels to color the background. Zack Arias has some great articles on his blog about it (zarias.com)

I would not go thunder gray or black... since OP has no lights to use, hair might blend into the dark background... white or light gray for me.

Oooh ,sorry..didn't see the no lights part...I'd recommend some digging around on strobist.com, good info on cheap lighting to get started.

no lights then gels don't matter, but gelling white isn't the greatest result.

hawk911 wrote in post #11818740
no lights then gels don't matter, but gelling white isn't the greatest result.

Just to add, gelling white BG's won't produce colors nearly as nice as gelling a gray background. Considering the op doesn't have any lights, I guess this is a moot point at the moment
You can see the results of gelling a gray background here>>> www.secondglimpse.com/​background

It's all about control. You can turn black seamless white, white seamless black, gray can go either way and you can gel any of them.

Most often it seems that people using gels want those rich, saturated colors. Black makes that the easiest but a roll of black seamless isn't always the most versatile. For the greatest versatility and ability to gel easily I would go with a studio gray, thunder gray, smoke gray, etc.. Those are all a bit darker than middle gray.

1 white
1 grey
1 black

That is all you will ever need. As Robert mentioned it is all in the lighting. With a few gells you can have any color you want. White to black. White lit with gells are a soft kinda pastel colors, grey a bit more solid, and black bold colors. More or less light will vary the colors to just about anything you want.

for me, any gel on white was just washed out, but that was also 2 yrs ago in my learning curve. I should try again

hawk911 wrote in post #11821694
for me, any gel on white was just washed out, but that was also 2 yrs ago in my learning curve. I should try again

It's only washed out because you're not achieving the correct balance between subject and background exposure.

If you use black as an example, then the background needs to be 4 stops reflective under the incident subject exposure. Easy to do with black seamless.

Put a piece of white seamless in its place and everything changes. This is where the control comes in.

You need to produce enough light in your subject exposure so that you're still 4 stops over the reflective reading of the background and you MUST have proper isolation of the subject from the background so that none of the subject lighting reaches the background. In many cases we don't notice that spill with gray or black because we can still get nicely saturated colors. With the white background, every bit of light reaching it brings up the exposure and minimizes the difference between subject and background, making the background lighter.

Producing vibrant colors on white is difficullt for the reasons you've just mentioned. It's very difficult to produce a black background with white seamless given the space restraits that we're often required to work in (such as reflective walls and not enough room to seperate subject from BG). Because of that, gray is a far better choice for flexibility iMO.