I took some pictures with Supermodel Georgia last month, and those pictures have been getting some great reviews Flickr. Let's go behind the scenes on that shoot briefly.
As you can see, I have a large white paper backdrop lit by two Alien Bees strobes. There's a Canon 580 EX on manual mode as a hair light just out of frame on the upper right. The yellow tool caddy is my stand-in for checking exposure and lighting.
Most of the shots are full-length on the white background but sometimes girls look better with a lower key background. When I want to switch to a black background quickly I use the Botero 037 black/white foldable reflector hanging from a lightstand. It's really quick to switch from the room-filling white backdrop to a 3/4 length black backdrop and the only real drawback is the length, as you can see in this shot:
I just put the lightstand holding the backdrop straight on the white paper. You can see the home-made snoot for the hair light in the upper right corner. The black rectangle on the left is a large piece of foam core board I use to block the camera's view of the left strobe, to but down on lens flare, glare, and washout.
Once you've got the lighting mostly right, two backdrops to switch between quickly, and a model, the only thing left to do is shoot! The results are here on Flickr and there's a mix of black and white backdrops. Notice how the black background shots don't include the feet?
Well, there's one more thing left to do, and that's clean up afterwards. Somehow that reflector folds into box the size of a large pizza and sometimes it's not obvious how to do it. You especially want to look like you know what you're doing when you're in front of a paying client, so watch the following video and practice!
Fold a large reflector like a pro
or if you hate music: http://youtu.be/sIn4_wHwfL4