Lighting a background with studio flash and gels

[Hodders]

I've been experimenting with lighting a mid-grey background with gels to get some flexible background colour.

The best effect is when I use a flash head with a standard reflector at about 5 feet from the background. This does have a habit of getting in the shot unless I am very careful to keep the model in front of it.

My other thought would be to mount the strobe on the ceiling and light the BG that way, but I don't want coloured light clipping the top of the model so it would have to be closer to the BG than the model.

Given the size of my studio this would mean about 4 feet away from the BG. So if I want to light the majority of the BG I would need a 96degree reflector and this would give me a 1 stop difference over the whole BG - in other words a nice graduated tone disappearing into mid-grey on the floor.

Does anybody know what the angle of spread is on the Lencarta wide angle reflector as it doesn't say on the website (unless the 900 in the description means 90 degrees).

Alternatively, how do people here light a background with a coloured gel as evenly as possible without using loads of space.... What modifiers do you use ?

 

[Garry Edwards]

Does anybody know what the angle of spread is on the Lencarta wide angle reflector as it doesn't say on the website (unless the 900 in the description means 90 degrees).

Yes, that final zero is supposed to be superscript, i.e. 90 deg.
The best tool for the job when space is tight is the background reflector

 

[Hodders]

Garry,

Do you have the spec for the background reflector in terms of the spread in degrees of the oval shaped pool of light. I.e. 90 degrees wide, 75 degrees tall.

My plan is to get the background lit by mounting a strobe on the ceiling about 4 feet from the BG dead centre, that way as long as the subject isn't standing too close to the BG there will be minimal coloured light hitting them.

I've worked out that a 90 degree spread will light the BG nicely at this range.