Photographing Scrubs on Seamless White
A friend of mine, having just finished her fourth semester of nursing school, wanted to take some photos of herself in her scrubs. Inspired by the catalog images on the website for the company making her nursing garments she wanted images on a clean white background, both traditional headshots, and catalog ready full length images.
The difficulty with taking images of this kind is getting a completely even white background, without having the white be so bright it bleeds into the image, and also keeping the subject illuminated in a flattering way. This process was essentially impossible with the amount of space I had to work with in my current basement studio set-up, so I had to get a little bit creative with my lighting and post processing workflow. Setting up the background and lights was the most time consuming part, trying to fit lights around the subject and backdrop with barely enough room.
Editing the full body images was a two step process, starting with the raw image, which lacks in saturation and contrast. Not to mention the original also has the equipment and floor beyond the seamless white in view. I processed the image in Capture One to balance the color and exposure to my liking, using the color picker on the white background to make sure my white balance was spot on. Next I exported the image, taking it into photoshop where I performed a small amount of retouching, added a white solid behind the image, and then masked out all but the subject with a very soft brush to get a perfectly white background the whole way across.
I was super happy with the full length images, having spent time playing with various poses and ways to convey movement without actually having space for the model to move freely. I wanted to convey multiple emotions, the more serious, hard working vibes as well as the more lighthearted and fun. The images I had felt to me like the images hospitals use on billboards or in the halls to try to make their staff appear competent or happy and charismatic. A few of the images such as the 3/4 view however seemed to fit more into the commercial product photography family, being very easy to imagine in a catalog for scrubs. The difficulty here had been getting honest looking emotions out of an amateur model as a photographer who normally works with inanimate objects, the posing process especially was a struggle for both of us, trying to figure out what worked, felt genuine, and looked natural.
For the headshot style imagery the focus shifted less from getting catalog style images and more to the type of images that one would use in a staff photo for one image, and then fun images for the rest. I wanted to capture the happy high-energy person in front of me, while showing off her progress in school and her goals as a future nurse. As someone who wants to work in the pediatric OR it seemed only fitting that we capture an image of her with a stuffed animal, and for an added bonus her name is Winnie, so the stuffed piglet in her arms works on an additional level.
