A set is the space a picture happens in. It might be a room built in a studio, a real place dressed for the day, a tabletop with a stone slab on it or a plain roll of white paper, and each of those is a decision. Whatever form it takes, a set does three jobs. It tells the viewer where they are, it gives the light something to do, and it puts the subject in a believable relationship with a world. A plain white sweep is a set that has chosen to do only the second job. Sometimes that is exactly right. The trouble starts when nobody chose it, and the sweep went up because it was already in the studio.
The first job is place, and the clearest lesson in it comes from a photographer who took place away. In 1979 the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth commissioned Richard Avedon to make a portrait of the American West. Over five summers, to 1984, he travelled to 189 towns in 17 states and made 752 sittings of miners, drifters, farmers and housewives, and he put every one of them in front of a plain white paper backdrop. The museum describes that backdrop as removing the visual markers of place so that attention falls on each person. That absence was the decision. A white sweep on a product shoot makes the same choice, and it should be made knowing that the product will then have to carry all of the meaning on its own.
The second job is giving the light something to do, and a set can do it with very little. Irving Penn stood upright backdrops at a sharp angle to make a narrow corner and photographed some of the best-known people of his time inside it, among them Truman Capote, Georgia O'Keeffe, Marcel Duchamp and Igor Stravinsky. The corner shaped the light and hemmed each sitter in, and how each person dealt with that small space became the portrait. A corner did a room's work. Penn also worked against plain grey, white and black backdrops, which gave him close control of the daylight he shot in at a time when elaborate artificial lighting was the norm.
A built set can do all three jobs at once, and the War Room that Ken Adam designed for Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove in 1964 is the textbook case. It was a huge triangular room suggesting a bomb shelter, about 40 metres long with a ceiling 11 metres high, and its shiny black floor reflected enormous wall maps. In the middle stood a round table lit from above by a ring of lamps, and Kubrick had it covered in green baize like a poker table, although the film was in black and white, so the actors would feel they were playing poker for the fate of the world. He also asked Adam to build the ceiling in concrete, so the cinematographer had to light the scene with the ring of lamps alone. The room says bunker, the lamps are the light, and the table turns a council of war into a card game. Steven Spielberg later called it "the best set that's ever been designed".
On an ordinary product or fashion shoot the same thinking comes down to a few decisions, taken in order. The comes first, because it is the largest area in the frame and it sets the register before anything else is read. Concrete, linen, lacquer and grass are four different brands. comes next. Something near, something in the middle and something far away stop a picture reading flat, and a little of the foreground out of focus gives the frame space. Then comes scale, because a prop the wrong size for its neighbours breaks a set at once, even when nobody can say what is wrong, and the camera exaggerates scale errors instead of hiding them. Colour, paint and props come after those.
Who builds it depends on the job. On a small tabletop shoot the prop stylist and the photographer often build the set between them from boards and surfaces the studio keeps on a rack. A larger job books a , who draws the set, orders the materials and runs a carpenter and a scenic painter. How little of a real room a set needs to be is covered in Location or build. At the ambitious end, Shona Heath, a long-standing collaborator of the photographer Tim Walker, turns his ideas into the physical sets he shoots in. Whoever builds it, say which of the three jobs the picture needs.
Try this
Give one object three sets, each doing one job
Choose a small object you own, such as a mug, a bottle or a shoe, and photograph it three times by the same window, changing only the set. For the first, curve a white sheet or a roll of paper from a wall down on to a table, so the set does nothing but hold the light. For the second, stand two large boards upright at an angle behind the object to make a corner, and let the corner shape the light. For the third, make a place, with a real surface under the object, one thing close to the lens and one thing far behind it. Keep the camera height and the lens the same. Then lay the three pictures side by side.
Time: About forty minutes. You need: One small object, a window with daylight, a white sheet or paper, two boards and a phone camera.
Look for
- Which set tells you the most about who would own the object, and which tells you the least.
- Where the light changed between the three, with nothing moved but the set.
- Whether the third frame has depth, meaning something near, something middle and something far.
- Whether anything in the third frame is the wrong size for its neighbours.
- Which of the three competes with the object, and what you would take out to stop it.
What to do it with
- set.a.light 3DSubscription
Simulates a studio lighting setup before the day, with real modifiers and measurable results.
Bad at A simulation of light is not light. Useful for planning and for teaching, not for final judgement.
- BlenderOpen weights or open source
Free, complete 3D: modelling, materials, lighting, animation and rendering.
Bad at Steep for a designer who has only ever worked in two dimensions. The default output looks like the default output.
- Capture OneSubscription
Raw processing and tethered capture, with colour handling professionals prefer to the alternative.
Bad at Priced for working photographers and organised the way they think. A designer will find the catalogue alien.
- MilanoteFree tier, paid above it
A board where images, notes and links sit together, built for the messy early stage.
Bad at Boards get big and stop being readable. It has no opinion about editing.
The words, in plain language
- Set
- The space a picture happens in, whether it is built, found or a plain paper sweep.
- Ground
- What the subject sits on or stands against. The largest decision in the frame.
- Depth
- Having something near, something middle and something far. What stops a picture reading flat.
- Believability
- Whether the space could exist. Scale errors break it first.
- Set designer
- The person who designs and builds the space a shoot happens in, and runs the crew that makes it.
- Practical light
- A lamp that appears in the frame and also lights the scene, like the ring of lamps in the War Room.
- Strike
- Taking the set down after the shoot. It costs studio time and needs a plan.
Why it matters
The commonest mistake is a set that competes with the product. A dramatic backdrop, a clever prop and a strong colour each look good in the planning, and together they leave the thing being sold as the fourth most interesting object in the frame. Decide what the set is for first. Nothing should be built or bought until that is written down. A set that damages the picture has cost money twice, once to build and again in the frames nobody can use.
The second is treating the ground as whatever the studio has. How far a change of ground alone can move a brand is shown in Surfaces, and why they matter more than props. The point for this lesson is that a ground nobody chose does none of a set's jobs on purpose, since it says nothing about place and the light lands on it by accident. Choose the ground first, for the brand, before any prop.
The third is the money. What a build costs in days and crew is counted in Budgets, crew and the build day. What belongs here is that the job decides the spend. Penn's corner of upright backdrops did a room's work, and Avedon's plain white paper carried 752 sittings over five summers, so a set that does one job well can cost very little. Work out which jobs the picture needs before anyone prices a build.
The module takes these decisions in turn. It starts with the choice between a real location and a built set, and with the studio's standard grounds, the cyclorama, the paper sweep and the tabletop. It covers surfaces and paint, what the camera does to scale, and the line between dressing a set and cluttering it. Then it deals with water, smoke and wind, with the budget and crew a build needs, with what happens when the set comes down, and with describing a set to an image model.
Elsewhere
- Type
- term
- Period
- ongoing