Little Joys and Backdrops
Sometimes the smallest things give you joy. For me, I love taking photographs and experimenting with new things. When I get the opportunity to do something new and it works that really makes things
Just a plain black backdrop, great but not for everything.
I have been shooting lots of people and animals in the studio and on location with seamless paper and pop up backgrounds. With pets, I need the wider paper because the animals tend to move, but after a while black and white backgrounds are a little boring. I had read online that hand-painted backdrops were the thing to use, but they can be really expensive. I listen to podcasts with Sharky James (Petapixel Podcast and the No Name Photo show) and he commented on this weird place you can get backgrounds from that are really great.
The idea with hand-painted backgrounds is you get great colours but also a mottled backgrounds but not like the 1970's backgrounds that look almost tie-dyed. These types of backgrounds are used by professional photographers to take images of movie stars. Anyway, the thrust of the interview was there was a supplier of these hand-painted background in Serbia. The arrangement for purchasing them was a little unusual and seemed very suspect but in the end you always get exactly what you asked for. The company is called Gravity Backdrops
The brown background - kinda taupe
Well I took a chance and tried it out. You go the website and it directs you to their facebook page. From this you go to the photographs in the Facebook album and pick the patterns and sizes of the backgrounds, sending an email with the code. Then you get a request to e-transfer money (cheaper but still not cheap) to some obscure email particular address (this is the fishy part). After I paid (fingers crossed) I received shortly after tracking information on my shipment. I then received backgrounds 1798, 1351 and 1652 (I don't actually remember which was which).
Blue background - beautiful blue
Remarkably quick I had a tube full of three backdrops. They are spectacular. I really enjoyed trying them out. I think they are awesome.
My favourite - the green background - more of an olive
I know these are trivial things. Nobody cares about backgrounds. Well, maybe I care about backgrounds. These are little joys, my little joys.
