Translucent Background Sweep

[Ron Marshall]

I'm looking for recommendations for a retail source in Chicago for translucent background material, to use as a sweep for tabletop product shooting.

Translucent mylar sheet, about 30" wide should be fine. It will be backlit so I'm not concerned about reflections. Frosted acrylic sheeting is another possibility.

[lenser]

Hi, Ron.

I don't know if calumet stocks this product or not, but I use something called ras:um which I order from Garrison-Wagner in St. Louis. It is about 40 nches with by many yards long. It comes in a tight roll that fits on the top carrier of my Bogen shooting table. I keep a sheet of clear or frasted plexiglass as the table top which alows for even light transmission from below and behind with the TransLum.

TransLum is about the transmission value of a plastic milk bottle and is quite sturdy for wear and tear. Pricing was not that bad the last time I ordered a roll a few years ago.

G-W is a company that primarily stocks things for retail store display and marketing use, so you may also find this product through that kind of local fim up in Chicago.

Good Luck.

Tim

[bspeed]

try looking for a industrial plastics dealer, yellow pages :)

I have bought sheets of Mylar from a industrial plastics supplier in Dallas, so you should have a few places in Chicago.

[Jim Michael]

Production services or theatrical supply should have Rosco materials in rolls. They'll have a swatch book.

Search page at http://www.rosco.com/us/retail/index.asp

[Frank Petronio]

4x8-foot by 1/8-inch milky white plexiglass from a plastic supplier (Formica, that sort of thing, there is one in every city) for about $80 last time I bought one. Don't pay for the Calumet version. Use heavy duty A-clamps to hold it onto a couple of sawhorses with a background bar in the back. Move the sawhorses to adjust the sweep.

[Henry Ambrose]

Frank's idea is good but...

Clear acrylic plastic with seamless paper on top will let you have a clean surface whenever you want. Plastic alone will scratch and get dirty pretty soon and glossy plastic surfaces will cause reflections that you won't get from paper.

[cjbroadbent]

I spent the worst years of my life shooting on a Persplex sweep or 'limbo'. I built a table with Foba tubes. Lighting was strobe and back lighting was more or less fixed to the bottom rear bar of the table. Getting a clean white meant two stops over and the subject suffered flare. Worse, the sheet of Persplex was never wide enough.
The only reason for a translucent sweep was because the production people were unable to do a decent 'knockout' or mask of the subject. There was no photoshop then.
In the end the ADs realized that a product floating around without a shadow to anchor it to the page was not a good thing.
That got rid of the awful translucent persplex but introduced the almost equally awful white formica sweep.
We had a shadow but but were still in limbo.
In the 90's some of us were able to junk the formica altogether and from then on, always shot with a horizon line and solid shadow. A horizon and a shadow give the viewer instant orientation.
Nowadays, products shot on white backgrounds often have a slight reflection in the shadow. I've done that with just a sheet on glass on top of white paper. This is even more helpful to orientation. The sweep part is photoshopped.
Art directors straight out of school think shooting on a sweep looks professional, but unless there is a 1970's revival, it looks terribly dated.

[Henry Ambrose]

Christopher brings up some good points that prompt a question -- what do you want to achieve with your lighting set up?

[Ron Marshall]

I'm shooting glass vases backlit. I intend to light the sweep from behind.

[cjbroadbent]

A sheet of persplex then. To get dark edges to the glass you will have to black out the persplex right into to the sides of the shot. Maybe use the shiny side of the persplex and drop the tone at the foot of the vases to get some reflection in the shadow. Good luck!

[Ron Marshall]

A sheet of persplex then. To get dark edges to the glass you will have to black out the persplex right into to the sides of the shot. Maybe use the shiny side of the persplex and drop the tone at the foot of the vases to get some reflection in the shadow. Good luck!

Thanks for the help, and the tip about blacking out the sides.

[mandoman7]

Light can be thrown through seamless paper too. The effect is different, of course, but possibly useful. A hole can be cut under the vases as well for light to get through.

If it really has to be the plastic sweep look, I ended up using a thick piece of flat plastic on top of which a thin sheet of diffusion was placed in a sweep shape to give a gentle gradation. The height of the gradation and its relation to the subject are often the key adjustments, so a thin rather than thick sweep makes it easier to alter the curve.

JY