Tricks to Get Black Background for Photographs

Tricks to get black background for photographs without easy Adobe Photoshop involves zero natural light captured by the camera by illuminating objects. The background is often an ugly beast for photographers. More often than you can think. In fact, one of the things that make you look more than a beginner is to choose the background of the photo properly, so that elements that distract the attention and ruin the atmosphere of the photo is eliminated. We already discussed about the importance of background in Photographic Composition.
In product photography, often using a white background simplify and give the due importance to the product. To do this we need a cheese cloth to use as a background. We are lucky even with a black background, there is a way to create it without resorting to accessories, merely less than an external flash. In this Tricks to Get Black Background for Photographs tutorial, we ll explain how to create a photo with a black background using only the camera settings and a flash plus a diffuser umbrella, but it is not necessary.

Tricks to Get Black Background for Photographs : How to set the camera

Basically, as said in the beginning, tricks to get black background for photographs involves zero natural light captured by the camera so that the picture contains only objects illuminated by the flash.

So, the first thing to do is reset the natural light. How it can be done? You obviously need to work on the parameters of the exposure triangle. First of all, put the camera in manual mode. The guide What Camera Mode to Choose Depending on the Situation might help the new users.

Sets the ISO to the minimum possible value, which will be probably 100 or 200. Secondly, set the shutter speed to as short as possible. Your camera will allow you to get down to very low values, thousandths of a second. If you could use these values ??that would be optimal, but you can not. Probably your flash has a maximum sync speed of 1/250s, so if you use faster speed, you will get a clear picture with black bands. As you might have guessed, the minimum shutter speed you can set is then equal to the maximum sync speed. You may contravene this rule only if your combination of camera and flash supports high speed sync.

This technology allows you to use shutter speeds much faster. In this way you can get the background as black. Finally, we will began working on opening. As you know, to reduce the amount of light captured by the camera, the aperture value must be increased. Then set an average value, such as f / 8 while photographing your subject and see if the background is appearing black, if it is not, increase the aperture value. Retry the photograph and continue to increase the aperture value until you get the black background. Once you have found the right opening, switch on and set the flash. From here on you will only see parts of the subject illuminated by the flash. This is the basic method.

Tricks to Get Black Background for Photographs : The best conditions for applying this technique

Following the instructions we have outlined above is not that what always works. There are some external factors to take into consideration so that it is applicable. Let us understand them.

Minimizing ambient light

If you are looking to get a black background like the way we have just described, in outdoors in full sun, certainly you will not get the desired result. In fact, the sunlight is too strong to be able to completely clear out, only special settings for the camera can give the result. High speed sync can give close to what you want, but in the hours when the sun is above our head, even this may not be enough.

To make the things much easier, try photographing at indoors. Inside the buildings, even in daylight, the intensity of light is low. Moreover, it is not difficult to reduce it further with curtains, shutters and blinds. Beware, however, that the environment must be spacious enough, for a reason which we will explain later*. If you want or need to force working outdoors, there are several ways to create a black background with the technique that we have just described, using the concept of lower ambient light – take snaps in the evening hours, heavily overcast days, a shady place and so on.

Here is where the external light meter becomes an important tool.

Beware about the background

The fact that you can create a black background using nothing does not mean that you should not pay attention to what is in the background. In fact, clear and shiny objects make it much more difficult to apply this technique. These primarily reflect the ambient light, try to increase the aperture further to make them to disappear. Secondly, once you have got your black background, white and shiny objects could reappear because they reflect the light from the flash. Fortunately it is easy to avoid this. The solution is simply to position yourself in a way so that the background is far enough. For a small subject, just position the background to a meter or so. If you want to photograph a person, better the background is a few feet away. Fortunately, the light emitted by the flash power decreases very rapidly as the distance increases.

Other points

* There is a big drawback in the application of the technique that we said we will discuss later in this article. With such high values ??of opening, the depth of field is very high. So we will be difficult, almost impossible, to get the focus. A very high focal length might give you a hand, especially for very short distance photo. But do not expect pictures with large areas of focus.

If you have an external flash, this technique is great for creating professional-looking photos without having a professional studio. You can use it successfully for photos of flowers, photos of things (like bottles) and portraits. The difficult part is to manage the flash, but that is another story.