Upde Designs

I had an opportunity this week to do some portrait work for one of our banks.  The bank held an event for a selected group of people and one of the opportunities we offered our guests was for them to have a portraiture of themselves made. So I got to do the photography.  I was happy to contribute a small amount to a very successful event.

When I do portraits I will normally use  a green screen for my backdrop.  Green screens and blue screens have been used for decades and have become an invaluable part of a photographer’s toolkit. By photographing subjects against a green screen or a blue screen background, they can be easily isolated from that background and composited onto a different background entirely.

The primary reason for using a specific color backdrop is to avoid clashing with any colors on your subject. This is why red screens are not commonly used – due to the amount of red in human skin, it’s impossible to get good results when shooting people. Green and blue are both far less prominent in skin tones and therefore work as a successful keying color.

Additionally instead of buying lots of different materials and trying to haul them around you only have to take one backdrop and then you can make the image look like it was taken anywhere.  The biggest problem with green screen is lighting it properly.  Too dark and it blends with subjects hair.  To bright and you get what is called green splash (where the green color actually reflects on your subjects hair and skin.  Not a good thing.  I’ve learned a lot about shooting against a green screen but it is still tricky and I always seem to struggle getting the lighting just right.

Now if you look at the image above.  I was set up for a portrait (one person, two at the most.)  But these women wanted a group shot so I had to improvise on the post processing.  I’m not thrilled with the end product but you get the idea.

What are some piratical uses for green screen?  You see it every day when you watch your weather forecaster stand in front of his/her map. 🙂  Thanks for checking in.