Stripes of Shadows

February 9th, 2022

I was inspired by a video on youtube.com Working with Blinds. There was small window shade for cheap on Amazon to create shadows on my test figure Emi. So I purchased it. My idea is to use this technique to produce images of living models, but I wanted to do tests first. I am glad that I did this first as the concept is simple. The execution of getting it to work was a challenge.

I setup two C Stands with an arm across them to hold my blinds. The easiest thing to try was to use clamps to clip the blind to the arm and hang them down. The blind does hang at a bit of an angle this way but it works well.

My first attempt involved putting a strobe directly Next to the shade at a distance from Emi. The resulting images showed now shadows of any kind.

Next I moved the strobe as far back as I could on the level of Emi’s waist and put the shades just barely out the the shot. This time I got a few shadows but with pretty heavy bright spots as well. I added a reflector to the strobe and the bright spots got worse, no help there. I tried a reflector with diffusion fabric which made the shadows go aways, also not helpful.

My next inspiration was to put the strobe up high and point down at Emi. I did not use a reflector here. Finally I started to get a reduction in the bright highlight spots. Still a bit but much better now. Then just for trying it, I pointed the strobe down more, the spots got less pronounced. My next thought, point the strobe directly at the ground. This solved my problem.

The resulting images show how I adjusted the angle of the blinds to give smaller and larger shadows. What surprised me was one side of the blind to the subject produced darker shadows and the other lighter ones. Quite a variety of difference. I also put the blinds at a bit of an angle to adjust the shadows more. To avoid issues with the light hitting the background I used a v-flat to block the light.