Blue Background Tutorial featuring Evana De Lune

A couple of months ago I had the pleasure of working with stunning burlesque performer and model, Evana De Lune from Melbourne. She was in Brisbane to do a couple of shows and to model for one of my workshops. 

We had settled on a Fetish theme for the workshop as that is very much Evana’s vibe and she had plenty of outfits to suit it. I wanted to use a fairly dramatic lighting setup to match and I thought a blue tone to the background would compliment all the black leather and some shadows would create some extra interest. 

I could have used my RGB LED panels to create the colour in the background, which is something I do quite often, but I wanted to do something a bit different this time. I remembered back to my art college days studying photography and a technique we sometimes used to create a blue tone in the background. 

It involved shooting with tungsten balanced transparency film and lighting the subject with a tungsten light. We often used this technique outdoors with a portable, battery powered tungsten light. As the colour temperature of the film matched the output from the tungsten light, the subject would appear correctly white balanced but anything in the background or surrounding the subject that was lit by daylight, would appear quite blue. 

The video below explains and demonstrates using this technique with modern digital cameras and a bi-color LED light to create the same effect and includes some of the BTS footage captured of Evana posing at the workshop. 

All the images were captured on my Fuji X-T4 with Fujifilm XF16-55mm f2.8. Exposure settings were as follows: 
ISO 1600
1/160th @ f4.0

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.