The Doctors Visit

​A few weeks ago I got a request to shoot four OB/GYN physicians for their website. They had originally wanted the doctors shot against a green screen but once I understood how the shots were going to be used we decided to go with a 12 foot wide white seamless background. The doctors wanted a number of looks which included white lab coats so I knew that shooting white against white could be a problem. In reality white lab coats are in very light grey so I knew that as long as I lit my background to a true white, the white coats would separate well from the background. I did this by putting i stop more light on the background. Another important consideration was to make sure I had even illumination all the way across and from top to bottom. Since both ceiling and walls were white I used 4 lights with reflectors and aimed them at the walls – 2 lights on each side of the seamless, one about 3 feet off the ground and the other was 3 feet below the ceiling. By bouncing light off the white walls and ceiling I was able to get a nice even light all the way across. I set my background to read f-16 with a light meter ( yes, i still use a light meter ! ) For those of you that have never used a light meter you can use the histogram on your camera to check how white your background actually is. For my subjects I used two 3 foot soft boxes positioned on my left as key lights which I set at f-11 and I added one additional light with a reflector in back and slightly to my right to act as a fill light. That light i aimed up at the ceiling being careful not to allow the light from the strobe to hit my subjects directly. So all together I used 7 lights and it worked perfectly.

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The light that was in back illuminating the white seamless was also giving me the added benefit of some very nice highlights.  If you look, especially at the faces you will see. This ads shape and tonality to the subjects and gives the shot some extra “pop”. I captured about 200 images in 2 1/2 hours which was pretty fast considering all the clothing changes and combinations we made. You can see how the images were used by going to the website  http://www.encinitasobgyn.com/index.html. The designer did an excellent job clipping and dropping the images onto various backgrounds for the website and promo material.

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