One gold background, three different looks | 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.

Having a simple theme for a set of studio portraits is a great idea. It gives your shoot direction, it can give your photo mojo a real boost, and gives a cohesive look to your images. So for his first themed shoot in his new small home studio. Photographer Gavin Hoey is going for gold!

To create his gold background Gavin uses nothing more than a couple of emergency blankets. Their large size and shiny, metallic gold look might make them a great choice of background in theory but Gavin’s first job is to sort out how to light them and make their gold color look natural.

Once the camera and lights are set up, Gavin shares three quick and easy ways to turn an emergency blanket into photographic gold. Starting with the simplest of studio set-ups, Gavin goes on to make a moveable gold corner and finally sets up some golden beauty lighting.

Want to check out some other tips and tricks for using backgrounds during a photo shoot? Take a look at these guides on 42 West:

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