If you are stuck with the harsh shadows could you reduce their intensity during PP?
Nooooooooooooooooooooo!
PP is not the answer. Why do people insist on advising people that the best way to improve their photography is to carry on doing it wrong, and then fix it later on a computer? That good photography these days? No... never will be either. Good photographers use good lighting. After imagination, creativity and originality, LIGHTING is the most important aspect of photography... stop advising people to ignore it and fix it in post. That's not photography... that's ****. He may have limited space to move the subjects away, and if that's the case, then he can't achieve what he wants, and trying to remove the shadows will look awful, especially as there are objects in from of objects, all casting shadows upon each other. It's almost impossible to retouch, as then it would make no sense. The girl sitting is casting really hard shadows onto the boy behind, so if you remove the backdrop shadows, you're just making massively obvious it's been retouched.
The problem is you're standing your subjects right against the backdrop, and then lighting them with one, single hard light source... on the right? Clearly not... the shadows would suggest the light source was to your left, not right. (unless you've flipped the image). I feel you know this though, as we've discussed this before.
Step 1: Shining through brolly - If you're now no longer doing this, then there's clearly still direct light from the flash reaching the subject, as those shadows are REALLY hard, and not consistent with using a white brolly properly at all.
Step2: Get your subjects away from the backdrop. There's no way you can stop shadows like this when your models are so close to the backdrop, even with a soft light source. If this is impossible, then you're just going to have to admit you don't have space for these full length roomset type images. You really need a lot of space for these... or.. use a VERY large light source.
Step3: Once you have distance between your subject and background, then you can think about separately lighting the background.
It's absolutely crucial you get your subjects away from that backdrop, and give sufficient space to light it separately or you're always going to struggle, or have to rely on post processing... which is a really p**s poor way of working. If you stand your subjects close to a backdrop and use a small lightsource you WILL get shadows. The only way to avoid this if you site the models close to the backdrop is to use truly huge light sources such as massive 6ft soft boxes and and equally massive reflectors on the opposite sides. A fill light directly behind the camera will also help massively, but again, this must be a very large light source.
You'll still get shadows, but they'll be soft... like this... (sorry about IMGUR's jpeg compression)
Here, the model was lit from the left with a huge 6ft x5ft softbox, and then the red gelled light from the lower right is also filling in the shadow too. It's very rare I'd shoot so close to a backdrop unless I WANT a shadow, and in fact, this is the only image I can find where I've done it. Even though that red gelled light is really confusing the image as an example of what I'm referring to, you can still see how SOFT that shadow would have been even without the red light It's not the fact that there are shadows, it's the fact that they are so hard in your case. It makes the image look like it's been shot with on camera flash... very snapshot-like
Ideally though, if you don't want shadows, you need to get your subjects away from the background.
My concern is the very heavy shadow on the background from the refletor. Would it have been better at 90 degrees?
Not really... no.
I have my little subjects as far as I can from the background, but I am limited for space, something I'm really trying to work out how to solve until we can build an extension on the house. I may have to just do waist up images for now.
If you can't get then away from the background, there's nothing you can do except use very, very large light sources, or concentrate on closer shots and get the kids away from that background.... light the background separately, but flag off the background lights so that no light from them hits the subject. This will also need more lights of course.
