Back in the day (about 7 years ago), I shot a few weddings. After one wedding I decided to just buy a projector from Amazon so I could quickly blast through a few shots during the wedding breakfast and have them projected onto a wall for the evening. It was a decent idea so feel free to take that for yourself.
Fast forward to last year, I decided to try some projector portrait photography. I still own that projector now, but I didn't do much research into the numbers.. Needless to say, that very projector was passable, but definitely not an ideal tool. The shots I got from that projector were a little messy and the lack of features made getting mediocre results a lot harder than it needed to be. However, this was a massive learning experience and helped shape things going forward.
For my recent shoot (and projector shoots going forward) I decided to get a decent second-hand Acer projector from eBay. I'll write a little projector guide next month going into what to look for when buying a projector, the most important considerations, and a few other little tips.
For now, this is the projector I settled on: Acer H6510BD DLP. I picked mine up on eBay for £165 with 400 lamp hours life left. This is a really nice and bright projector at 3000 lumens and a 10,000:1 contrast ratio. (I'd have preferred longer lamp life remaining but it is what it is).
I had a few ideas I wanted to try out, so I spent 7 hours over 2 days finding and creating a range of images to use. This part was way more time-consuming than I had anticipated! The range of images I put together included things like florals, silhouettes, sunsets, geometric shapes, minimalistic shapes, and a few more complex images that didn't work in the slightest!
As I was projecting on both the model and the background the most simple images worked the best. More complex images would have been better suited to just background projection only.
The initial setup was simple, I placed the projector just off-centre, above head height and angled it down. I love hard light in general so this was perfect for me! I have a laptop stand plate thing that sits on top of light stands I used for this (I'll find the actual one I use so it makes sense)
PiXAPRO 45x40.5cm Quick Set-Up Utility/Laptop Tray with Strap
The first set of shots consisted of basic shapes and the projector as the only light source. ISO sat at around ISO 800, shutter speed 1/125th and f1.8 aperture.
I boomed a Godox SL100 constant light for a little more subject illumination and shadow softening. I used a small beauty dish and grid to restrict the light hitting the background, washing out the projection.
One of the ideas I wanted to try out was mixing gels with the projected image. Of course, I could colour the projected image beforehand but I wanted to experiment. I used one of my Godox AD200s, gelled with orange, and on a really low power, bounced into a white umbrella for the colour fill. On black and white shots this worked perfectly. I decided to try on already coloured images and it made them look muddy! Who'd have guessed this would be the outcome..
I didn't get any behind the scenes as I wasted 35 minutes just trying to get into the studio (don't ask) so time was THIN. (Partially an excuse for my laziness) I have another coming up soon that I'll make sure to get shots of all the setups, connections, etc. I'll need them for writing a "how to do projector portrait photography" guide/post anyways.
Below are a couple of different shots using lines as the projected image. These were black and white images with blue gel fills. The featured image on this post is an orange gel fill with colour grading.
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