You don’t need a lot of equipment to create multiple looks in one shot. In this video, John Gress discusses which platform you should choose if you’re looking for maximum flexibility, demonstrating five different skins.
When I started shooting portraits for both commercial and editorial purposes, I learned a few quick and essential things. The first is that you need to learn how to make boring spaces interesting and the answer is almost always lighting. Second, with the aforementioned lighting, you can create a lot of different results. In fact, if you buy wisely, you can have a relatively small arsenal, but still be able to produce different images consistently.
So what kind of background allows for maximum flexibility? The background has no texture, mid gray. If you choose white, it will be much harder to use colors and aim for a pleasant, uniform gray. If you choose black, you more or less cannot get a clean white background, unless you use reflectors and other lights, completely ignoring the background. While textures are great, your background is obviously the same in every shot if people can start to recognize patterns in the textures.
In this video, John Gress created five stunning and completely different shots using only gray backgrounds and creative lighting.
