Uneven and overexposed portrait lighting - need some suggestions

[mateoc15]

Below is how I am setting up a portrait. My son (3 weeks old) is sitting on a table on his belly facing the camera. He's curled up. The backdrop goes down from the supports almost to the floor, then back up over the table and down to the ground. This just gives me a better eye-level shot. The idea is to get him on a black background with little else. I'll eventually use post production to make everything but him truly #000000 black. I'm having a few problems.

I either get washed out over-exposure with him washed out and the black turns gray-ish (not what I want) or the whole thing is underexposed with too many shadows on him. In the first scenario he's so curled up that there are lots of deep shadows under his arms, the bottom half of his face (he's lying on his side), and other issues.

Here's what I have tried.

* Change height and distance of soft boxes (above and level with subject, from 3-8 feet away)
* Low/high ISO (lower = better as far as making the black closer to black)
* Using a single strobe with reflector on other side
* Manual and aperture-priority modes
* Strobe power level

Everything ends up with deep shadows (which I may not be able to avoid) and uneven lighting.

So, any suggestions? I can post some examples when I get home tonight.



Thank you!

[zona5101]

A picture would be great... but it all boils down to getting the exposure right. You need to expose for the subjects skin and properly capture that. Your background and foreground will go deep black to light gray depending on how much spill they recieve.

[autofocus]

what kind of lights are you using...soft light strobes doesn't tell me much? Are you using any modifiers on those lights?

[sk66]

How are you metering for the exposures? You need to be using incidence metering or spot metering.

[timiroberts]

Best advice would be to shoot in manual.
Start off with your shutter at your camera's sync speed (usually 1/200 - 1/250th sec). This should kill off any ambient light, unless you're doing this next to a large window in the middle of the day.
Start with aperture around 5.6
ISO 100 - 200 (as low as you can go)
Start with the flashes around 1/2 power or lower.
Pop off a shot and see what everthing looks like.
If it's over exposed, adjust your aperture (to a higher number) until the subject is exposed correctly, or lower your flash power until it is exposed correctly, depending on the Depth of Field you want.
This should be able to take care of it.

[AdrenoJunkie]

You can also try pulling the table as far away from the background as possible and bringing your lights in as close to your subject as possible. The more you increase the flash-subject/flash to background ratio the less light you'll have spilling on your background. I think I said that right. You can use flags to limit even more light from going where you dont want it to.