Light Room to Dark Room | Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey

Gavin Hoey

Gavin Hoey is a freelance photographer, writer and trainer of all things photographic. His work is regularly featured in photography magazines, websites and videos.
Gavin has a real passion for sharing his photography and Photoshop knowledge. In 2008 he started recording and uploading video tutorials to YouTube. These quickly gained a large following and to date his videos have been viewed over 20 million times.
In 2010 Gavin was the winner of Adobe’s “Next Photoshop Evangelist” competition and since then he has given training demonstrations in Photoshop, Lightroom and Photoshop Elements in the UK, Europe and the US.
In 2012 Gavin joined forces with Adorama as a presenter on Adorama TV, where he inspires and teaches photographers from around the world in the art of photography and post processing.

Whether your studio is permanent or temporary it will probably have white walls. That’s usually a good choice for lots of reasons but what happens when you need to temporarily turn your light, bright studio/ room into a dark and moody shooting location?

In this video photographer, Gavin Hoey has an opportunity to photograph a model who’s created a stunning styled look with a vintage theme. The plain white walls of Gavin’s small home studio just don’t look right, so the challenge is to make a dark background that’s versatile and removable.

Gavin starts simply with a pop-up black background. However, as Gavin points out, even a basic black background needs careful lighting. Light falloff and separation lights are all discussed and demonstrated.

Next Gavin steps up the mood with a mottled and textured background that comes from a very surprising source. Gavin’s use of a Flashpoint EVOLV200 as a background light helps lift the shot and with the addition of an orange gel, also adds a splash of color.

Finally, Gavin completes the look with a large helping of atmosphere which in this case comes from a second-hand chandelier and his trusty Chauvet smoke machine.

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