There are so many different canvas and muslin recreations but nothing beats a custom, hand-painted backdrop.
#BACKDROPS FOR PHOTOGRAPHY DIY HOW TO#
I wanted brush strokes and texture – not a tie-dyed sheet! So with lack of resources for what and how to do it, I put the idea of a DIY background in the back of my head.
A lot of people ended up dying muslin, but that wasn’t what I wanted to deal with. I often thought about creating my own backdrop and google was no help on tutorials or tips. To have my own Oliphant backdrop would be a huge milestone and investment in my career. You can get anything from metallic backdrops to custom scenic sets. Sarah Oliphant and her team create the most exquisite customize backdrops for photographers, cinematographers and more. I would often spend nights browsing the web for the best canvas backdrops and frankly nothing really stuck out to me except Oliphant Studios. I would always be on the lookout for a great textured wall to use in a portrait session. I love finding textured backgrounds for my shoots and I think that comes from me starting out my photography training shooting outdoors. The backdrops looked amazing with natural light and with strobes and modifiers. There was a room with a wall of numerous hand-painted canvas in many different colors and I always gravitated to that room. My first encounter using these was a couple years back when I would use the Graffiti Warehouse in Baltimore for some model test shoots. I love how timeless these canvas backdrops are at first glance I felt like these types of backdrops were for boring school portraits only, but I’ve seen them used in so many fashion and portrait shoots that I knew I had to have some for myself! When you do a quick google search for Old Masters Canvas Backdrops, you see a lot of really dated photography (#sorrynotsorry hence the word old) that uses these backdrops in an un-timeless way. Since I’ve been primarily shooting in the studio this year, the majority of my work has evolved from outdoor natural-light to an indoor, studio light type of situation and I’m always on the prowl for new and exciting elements that I can add into my shoots. For the past year I’ve been obsessing over hand-painted, old masters canvas backdrops.