Newborn Photography | Black Against Black Background

© 2013 Wazari Wazir | Mother and Daughter

This is just a simple set up that I like to do with my newborn, previously I’ve done it to my son HaiQal and Raphael when they were few weeks old. Anyway this is just a simple set up. For a start we need to get a dark background and for this purpose I use a black velvet, this one is 4 meter long but three meter long will do, I prefer black velvet because it is not that expensive and it can absorb light, so they will produced deep black.

My wife wearing a deep blue long sleeve T-shirt with deep blue veil. Yes I can choose a black T-shirt for my wife but I still need a slight separation between my wife and the pitch black background, actually I can make the background darker than this one in post processing but I choose to keep it a little bit lighter this time around.

I didn’t use any studio lighting here, it is just natural light, I hung up the black velvet at the front door (covering the door) of my house and my wife is holding our baby in front of it, plain simple. The trickiest part is to get the right exposure.

In this case the exposure can become tricky, if you are using Auto Program Mode, your camera tend to overexposed the shot because the camera think that the subject is “too dark”, so they need to give it extra exposure, the reason is that large area in the frame is dark. To get the best result, you need to use SPOT METER in your camera and take the reading from mid tone area somewhere around your baby face or your subject face and LOCK the exposure is you are using Program Mode, because if you don’t LOCK the exposure and then you decided to reposition your subject, then the exposure will change.

So the best solution is to use MANUAL Exposure where you can use the Spot Meter, take the reading from your subject Mid Tone area and then reposition your subject within the frame and you don’t have to worry about the exposure because once you get the right exposure, it will never change even though your  reposition your subject in Manual Mode.

Yes is just a quick shot, it is not perfect but hopefully you guys have an idea on how to get the shot, how to get black on black background, hopefully with this little information, you can improvise it to make it much better than this one. Just be remember if you want to take this similar shot, just keep it simple, let your subject wear dark clothing without any colors so that we can concentrate on the subject face without being distracted from any fancy colours.

I use 50 mm lens for this shot and I didn’t use any reflector, on why the lighting look soft, maybe it is because I photograph this one in the late afternoon during an overcast day. One more thing, if you want a deeper black, then make sure that the distance between your subject and the black background are are quite far a bit and you will get much better black.

If you ask me on why I don’t use flash? My answer is that, I don’t have any…