This first shot is done with only ambient lighting that came from a chandelier behind camera right. This is just to give you the idea that you don't have to work in a totally dark room.
Camera settings:
1/4 f/8 ISO1600
The main thing to keep in mind is your subject to background distance. You want to be able to prevent your key light from spilling onto your background. For a small object I find a distance of 5 - 7' acceptable when using a shoot through umbrella as key. If you're using a much more restrictive modifier like a snoot or a grid you can get a bit closer to your background if space is an issue.
In this situation I found a setting of 1/160 f/8 ISO800 to be more than adequate to get me a black photo. And what I mean by that is: press the shutter and all you see is a black image. From this point on all the light that you will see will come from off camera flash. Why 1/160 f/8 ISO800 than something else?
My Canon 40D max sync speed is 1/250 but my transmitters battery was getting low so I was getting shutter creep. 1/160 was the fastest I could get till I replaced the battery. Because I wasn't concerned about ambient light dialing up to the max sync speed is one of the ways to kill this. f/8 was selected because I wanted to get as much DOF possible and because of this I choose an ISO of 800 so my flash wouldn't have to work to hard.
Shutter, aperture and ISO all play into dialing the correct settings in your camera. The way to gain this type of control is to shoot in full manual and not any of the semi manual modes or any of the mountain and running man modes.
Using only 1 flash in a shoot through umbrella positioned camera left the background stayed black while the flash gave enough light to illuminate the Wii remote as well as the table to give a nice reflection
Camera settings:
1/160 f/8 ISO800
Stobist info: 1 430EX 1/64 power shoot through umbrella camera left
Now since we have control of the background we can play with it by placing another flash behind the remote to light up the wall.
Camera settings:
1/160 f/8 ISO800
Stobist info:
1 430EX 1/64 power shoot through umbrella camera left
1 550EX 1/16 power behind Wii remote pointed at wall
If you wanted to get some color back there you can simply place some color gels on the flash head.
Camera settings:
1/160 f/8 ISO800
Stobist info:
1 430EX 1/64 power shoot through umbrella camera left
1 550EX 1/16 power gelled red behind Wii remote pointed at wall
Camera settings:
1/160 f/8 ISO800
Stobist info:
1 430EX 1/64 power shoot through umbrella camera left
1 550EX 1/16 power gelled blue behind Wii remote pointed at wall
Or if you wanted to get that whole seamless white background all you need to do is juice up the power to the background light. Since the table I'm using reflects nicely it will pick up on all that light coming from the background and just blend in
Camera settings:
1/160 f/8 ISO800
Stobist info:
1 430EX 1/32 power shoot through umbrella camera left
1 550EX 1/2 power behind Wii remote pointed at wall
In the setup shot you can see the relative distance between the wall and the table, where the lights are placed as well as camera position.
Thanks again for all the retweets, comments and favorites on twitter. I hope the above helps and if you still have any questions post in the comments here, on flickr or send me an email and I'll get back to you.
Have a good one!
