Thrifty Tip – Recycled Gift Wrap Backdrop
It’s never too early to break out the ugly sweaters and craft a festive photo shoot for next year’s holiday season. This thrifty tip not only helps you save on a custom background, it’ll shave 12 months of wrinkles off next year’s greeting card.
Just smooth out all those shredded scraps of gift wrap before they find their way to the curbside pickup. Actually, a decent amount of wrinkle will give your background some nice texture when you tape everything to a substrate. I made my background on an old projector screen.
To make the most of your new background, I recommend lighting your background separately so that it doesn’t start looking too drab. I placed a bare flash very close to the background to really bring out the crinkle in the wrapping paper. To keep the background light off the subject I added some black foil as a simple gobo.
For the self-portrait (yes, that’s me grinning like an idiot) I had a 580ex at about 45 degrees to camera-left as key light with a homemade grid attached. An on-camera flash bounced into a silver umbrella on camera-right provided enough fill without flattening out the background.
For these last two shots, I used the same lighting for the background and then shot through a white umbrella for the key light. I bounced an on-camera flash on the white ceiling for a little extra fill.
