Backgrounds Are Important
The Photography Session Background is important, so choose it carefully.
As a general rule, light backgrounds are best to produce a delicate effect; dark backgrounds are best for a dramatic effect. But don't forget to consider the tonality of your subject. To give depth and snap to your images, place a light toned subject against a dark background and place a dark toned subject against a light background.
For some variety you might consider different colors for different subjects:
Blue for Children and Young Women.
Brown for men and adult women.
Blue for Children and Young Women.
Brown for men and adult women.
For dark skin, a light background is usually a better choice. Use your good taste and imagination. Just make sure that the color of the background does not reflect an unpleasant color cast back upon your subject.
You can use a plain wall as the background or you can hang a sheet or blanket on the wall as a background. But if you plan on taking professional quality photographs, then you need to invest in a quality background.
Backgrounds come in many different types of materials, such as canvas, muslin (very popular), vinyl, paper and even digital. A popular muslin background is the hand painted "Hot Spot" Old Masters background. This gives the same effect as using a background light.
Another type of background gaining in popularity is the digital background, which is an image file of a scene in which you can chroma key your subject. Either a Green screen or Blue screen, green is usually prefered because it has less effect on skin tones. Green Screen backgrounds are used exstensively in video production, think of you local weather person.
Even if you have a small home studio, you should try to have at least two backgrounds available for use, and learn to be creative with your lighting set-up and use of your light meter to achieve many differnet effects.
