Background for Cooking Series

[Ty Ford]

Charcoal Muslin instead of white?

Actually use the white first then hang the charcoal over it so the white acts as a diffuser between the white and camera. Adjust the key and fill lights and exposure for how dark you want the charcoal to look.

Regards,

Ty Ford

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[William Kamp]

I’d use some duvetine and some c-stands outside the window to block off the light streams hitting the window. Then I would continue using the fluorescents, but put a little color back in his face by adding a 1/4 or 1/2 CTO in front to warm only his face up a bit. Keep the rest of the room in the white Daytime balanced look. You’re best looking stuff is the bottom two (other than the weird shadows on the window) The top one is to orange and looks like you lit it at night.

Hope this helps? Good luck on your shoots!

Best,
Will

[Mark Suszko]

My idea would be to make a one-piece easy background by hanging seamless cloth material from an auto-pole, out of shot. You can get really wide seamless cloth at a good price from RoseBrand in New York.

If you can’t afford that, and the seamless paper or whatever it is, is all you have, turn the seams’ “bug” into a “feature”, and build the background so that the seams look intentional. Add some wooden slats between the joints for a shoji screen-like effect, or hang more, but narrower vertical panels, alternating shades of the same color,same color as in your graphics, to unify things, maybe do some very faint sponge-painting texture in grey on the even or odd panels, with some overlap of the panels in the z-axis, and you can use edge-lighting effects with color gel washes, from simple 10-dollar parabolic reflectors and either gels or colored incadescent bulbs.

This gets you a cheap but effective background that has some controllable amount of visual interest, but that need not look very “busy”, and it would be super-cheap to make with either photog’s paper rolls or discount store bolts of actual cloth. And it would be light and easy to deploy and store between shoots. You could add some “branding” in the sponge painting by using the show’s logo or title in the painted parts as a repeating motif.

A personal aside, and my own opinion only: I HATE those cut-away side shots of the talent from a b-roll camera where the eye-line is off to one side for absolutely no reason. I see this kind of shot misused a lot, and I think it makes your work look less professional than a more conventional use of shots. This cut-away is being used in improper context, IMO.

The absolute masters of great cooking shots are Alton Brown and his DP. They make the conventional shots perfect,a dn their highly imaginative POV shots and cut-aways are great because as wacky as they can get, they are ALWAYS well-motivated.

[John Trefry]

Great suggestions and very keen observations! Especially astute into the use of the Bcam off center shot being out of place. It has always felt a bit jarring to me and was only used as a cut point. I’ve since employed using a quick push that does the job just fine.

Mark-
Could you elaborate a bit about using wooden slats in place of a paper background? I am very intrigued by the idea of a Shoji screen type look, although I’m not quite sure how to achieve that. The basic set up at the location are the large, industrial-looking white shades that hang in front of the window. As mentioned in the previous post, those shades are quite see-through and require some sort of diffusion behind (or in front). I’m curious how you would recommend using the Shoji screen look:

Thanks!

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