The Beatle's White Album

So, in previous post I was discussing Light Science and Magic's suggestion of using a mirror to reflect a large (white) light source, and then using that as a background for a white-on-white shot. I was thinking that a good test would be The Beatle's White Album because a) it is white, b) the CD would be highly reflective which would raise the difficulty bar, and c) the album just turned 40 last year, so this would be a tribute shot.

As for lighting - this is a single large softbox above the mirror, but I also used a hand-held reflector in the front to add detail to the shadow of the bottom of the CD case. I tried white, gold, silver, and silver/gold reflectors. I initially thought white or silver would have been best choice but they seemed to make the photo a bit too cool. The photo above is with the gold/silver combo -- just enough fill light, and just a bit of gold to warm up shadows.

A note about 2 post-processing items: 1) the background was lit a bit uneven, RGB (244,244,244) to RGB (252,252,252) just slightly off white from left to right. I went into photoshop and used a levels-layer to map these background whites to a solid RGB(250,250,250) -- this is the "white" we use in class for stock photography -- we never output a straight white or a straight black. This is why you see it not quite-so-white on the pure white background of this web page.

2) As I remember in the Strobist's 102 lesson on "spectral lighting", when you reflect off of glass or plastic like this, you can still see through to the items behind the glass (like seeing someone's eyes behind their glasses, or in our case, seeing THE BEATLES behind the plastic CD case), but it somewhat reduces the contrast of the items behind the glass. I went into photoshop and selectively bumped up the contrast of the words to keep them from looking a bit washed out.

(Dang, now that I am writing this, I realize that *maybe* a polarizing filter on the lens could help in this situation. I'll go down to the studio and try it out and report back).