turning black velvet white

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alphoto

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anthony lewis
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Please someone help!!!!

I went to focus on imaging last year and saw a demo from john clements and uzair kharawala they managed to change a black velvet background to white! I have been trying all sorts of setups and have not yet come close. Did anyone out there see the demo they were on the nikon stand with the lasolite people.

any help would be great.

ALphoto
www.anthonylewisphotography.co.uk
 
i saw this on a dvd i got off a friend the other day. its the onelight workshope dvd google it and you will find it. its an amazing dvd! he dosnt turn velvet white just turns the background studio white. i havnt got the dvd to hand but its all to do with the strob being pointed at the wall behind and overpowering the ambiant light i think.
 
It depends on the nap of the cloth. You have to angle the light across it so the light is reflected, rather than absorbed (it isn't actually absorbed of course, otherwise the cloth would burst into flames....before nit pickers get hold of my words) - it is just not reflected....one way you will see the velvet looks shiny, the other way dull. You want the shiny side so your light can graze off it (not like a cow either).

Then you will have to play with the amount of light, white is white (or actually burnt out black in this case), not so much for the whiteness of your velvet, but for the flare it might introduce elsewhere in the picture. You only need enough to burn out the cloth, any more is overkill and unecessary and will start to put light in elsewhere that you don't want (or maybe you do).
 
Lensflare's answer is right. Velvet has a strong nap, it must be brushed with the nap otherwise it reflects a surprising amount of light. Because of this, if the velvet background includes both 'floor' and 'wall' the vertical nap on the 'wall' photographs black and the floor doesn't.

It's all about angle of incidence/reflectance and 'skimming' a light across the nap certainly does increase the amount of reflectance - but then cos law kicks in because relatively little of the light would be reflected back towards the camera...

With the nap correct, black velvet still reflects around 5% of the light incident upon it, so with enough light a black background can still show as white, just as a white background will show as black if it is totally unlit.
 
Thank you to all, just had a go cant believe it was as simply as turning around the background that I have but that seems to be giving me the best results.

Thanks alot for the info.

Anthony
 
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