The philosophy I have when shooting on pure white is that I want to light the BG and the subject independently from each other. Meaning; The light on the subject isn’t making a change to the exposure on the background and the light on the background isn’t making a change to exposure on the subject. As I talked about before, those cutters on the sides of the set are key to making this happen. The next consideration is keeping the subject a fair distance away from the background as well.
In this first example my subject, Thomas, is about 11 feet away from the white seamless hanging behind him. The closer he gets to the background, the more likely it is that light reflecting off of the seamless is going to add exposure to him in the final image. The further I get my subject away from the seamless, the less light coming in from the background will get to him. I’ll talk more about that specifically in a bit.
