Where are your pics to date...can we see some from the rig you were using?
Are you making a site like Ed's?
If you are talking to me, then you can see the Underwater quad in that thread I linked to. That was just with halogen work lamps shining thru drop ceiling light diffusers. It worked ok, but the color of the lighting was off, it wasn't even and unless they happened to be flat, the posters had to be weighted down. I could have moved to a steel sheet and magnets, but if I was going to go to that trouble I decided to should build a vac table.
So recently I tried to build one that would be *really* light weight so I could use our living room temporarily as a photo studio -- blow through 100-200 pics in a few hours, and then spend a few weeks posting everything. Repeat. Problem was, I used a PVC frame with plywood sandwiched on either side with liquid nails. It was 100% flat when I assembled it. However, I think because of torque on frame from the hanging hooks it warped after only a few weeks or so while I was messing around with lighting. Next vac table will be built thicker, with wood, and will sit on the floor so I won't have to worry about warping. It will also be made with a pre-perforated metal sheet. I hand drilled the plywood -- Ugh. The spacing was too great so it barely worked for rolled posters. Linen was out of the question.
As for lighting, I tried 2-strobes facing each other about 4 feet away from the poster, but that was the max the room would allow and the edges were too bright. Then I tried 4 corner constant lights (daylight CFLs made for portraiture) bouncing into white umbrellas. That was a bit more even, but I couldn't get it exactly correct -- the problem turned out to be the warped vac board. So now I'm hoping that when I move up to my attic with the floor setup that I'll have enough space to push the strobes back further to even them out. You can use faster shutter speeds and don't need to worry as much about vibrations and what not. If that doesn't work I can always go back to the 4 corner lights and a 1/4 second shutter -- and they will be INFINITELY easier to place when sitting on the floor. Trying to get 4 corner lights setup evenly on a
vertical board was insane. You have to remember that it was a temporary room so everything had to be free-standing. I had two booms on stands for the top two lights. It was a mess. As it is now I'm going to have to have the camera on a boom, which I'm not happy about, but it does seem like the best of a bunch of compromised options. If I had a dedicated space I could simply attach the vac board to the wall properly and move the strobes back until they were even across the poster. Done.
You also have to understand that I'm being ridiculously anal about this. Shooting overhead with 2 strobes will look amazing for probably 99% of my posters. The only times I noticed slight unevenness in the lighting was on posters where the majority of the background was matte black. Even then the falloff at the center was very minor. Still, I want to get it *perfect* so I'll have no desire in the future to reshoot anything. With my $100 halogen setup I probably shot 100+ posters before I realized that it wasn't working the way I wanted. I vowed not to have to reshoot them a third time!
Here is that Underwater quad shot with my first crude halogen/floor setup:
Here is an example of shooting with 2 strobes on my 1st vac board before it warped:
And yes, my goal is to put together an Eastern European reference site -- a la Ed's FilmOnPaper. The Polish, and to a lesser extent the Czechs, get all the attention. But to my knowledge no one has done a nice comprehensive site that covers more countries. There are very cool Hungarians, Romanians, East Germans, Russians and even some Yugos (
) that are waiting to be appreciated. And one of the coolest things is to see how the posters for the same movie compare across those countries. Stay tuned... but don't hold your breath!
