Ceiling Colour

sirch

sirch

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Strictly amateur here and shooting stuff indoors in my house at the moment due to plague, weather etc. This might be a dumb question but what colour are studio ceilings? All our ceilings are white or very pale colours (e.g. cough magnolia cough), the house also has a lot of windows and I think the light coloured ceilings are affecting my ability to get dramatic fall-off across small still life type subjects.

Assuming I were to repaint a ceiling what colour/shade would be good from a "studio" lighting point of view? It's not likely to happen but I am interested for future reference.
 
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In a perfect world, all studio ceilings are both
1. Very high
2. Black
 
Well, if you avoid the use of umbrellas (and especially the shoot-through type) and ensure that all other light modifiers point downwards to some extent, you can mitigate the problem to a large extent.

And then there are the walls to consider, you don't want them to bounce light either. To a large extent, even in a small space, you can use the inverse square law to your advantage, i.e by keeping your set as far away from the walls as possible and having your lights as close to the subject as possible (which almost invariably is usually where they should be anyway). And you won't get dramatic light fall off if you don't have them really close.
 
Garry Edwards said:
Well, if you avoid the use of umbrellas (and especially the shoot-through type) and ensure that all other light modifiers point downwards to some extent, you can mitigate the problem to a large extent.

And then there are the walls to consider, you don't want them to bounce light either. To a large extent, even in a small space, you can use the inverse square law to your advantage, i.e by keeping your set as far away from the walls as possible and having your lights as close to the subject as possible (which almost invariably is usually where they should be anyway). And you won't get dramatic light fall off if you don't have them really close.
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Thanks Garry, I've got a soft box but getting a reasonable distance from other walls is a bit of an effort without lots of furniture removals :)
 
My mates studio has low ceilings, think old office. And he painted his a mid gray.
 
My studio in the large shed is painted mid grey on the advice of Garry when he worked at Lencarta.

Seems to do the job well.
 
GreenNinja67 said:
My studio in the large shed is painted mid grey on the advice of Garry when he worked at Lencarta.

Seems to do the job well.
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Yes, I will have said that, it's a good compromise. In the real world, very few of us have the luxury of large spaces with high ceilings, so we have to make the best of what's available.
And working in totally black studios has its downsides anyway, it can be a very depressing working environment.
 
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