First, you don't want your light spilling onto the background, so you need space between subject and background and highly directional light. Gridded soft boxes and flags work.

Second, you want to set your aperture so that the background is sufficiently in focus.

Third, be aware of the lighting in the background. If the light appears to be coming from upper left in the background, try to keep your light coming from upper left as well.

Fourth, check white balance of the projector. You may need to gel your flashes to compensate.

Fifth, set exposure level for the background image, and then set flash power to match. You don't want the subject to be much brighter or darker than the background, but a little difference may be needed to keep the subject from blending in. Depends upon the nature of the background.

Well THAT was a curmudgeonly remark, from someone who recently said:

"Only have met an occasional curmudgeon, they don't seem to last too long here."

Before selecting this thread, I read up and down the list and selected this because it states "anything related to photography".

Is LIGHT "related to photography"? Sure seems to me like it is. In fact, light is the sine qua non of photography. And so are eyes. I thought I would enlighten reasonable people. My bad.

Whether or not you like what I said is akin to disliking pictures posted of churches or religion-based paintings. It's a judgment call. I can't please everybody and would not want to. I think just a few of you can drive away creative, informative people like me, and everyone will be the poorer for it. Those two qualities are highly valued almost everywhere, except perhaps with atheists and l*****ts.

I followed the broad guidelines "anything related to photography".

Nothing on the main board, copied below, reads "Christian Photography section".

Photographs can be beautiful, informative, funny, documentary, diagnostic, and much more besides. But they all begin with light, that ethereal "stuff" that every seeing person uses every day of their lives.

Please read on to learn just a few of the amazing aspects of light, and seeing of course, which were unknowable until recently, and largely unknown throughout the world today. The scientists, physicians, and students who do know of them may not appreciate the Creator's Independent Handiwork.

First, light has an extraordinary and constant speed. If you shoot it out of the front of a fast jet, it doesn't go any faster than if you shoot it out the rear of the same jet. Einstein first figured this out. Wavelengths may shift, but the velocity does not.

This extraordinary velocity has a profound implication for life on earth.
The sun's life-giving heat is a function of the velocity of light squared. So if light were slightly slower, the sun's heat would be lowered by the square of that amount. It wouldn't take much of a reduction for earth to be a perpetual ice ball, devoid of life.

One major exception to our inability to affect this velocity is your camera lens. Another is your cornea. Yet another, your vitreous, formerly called vitreous humor. Light passing through a medium is slowed down, and bent. Without this slowing/bending, we would be blind. We could not take photographs, much less even see them.
The slowing is proportional to the bending, or refractive index we measure even for air and water.

The elegance goes on, however, for a long, long way. Barbara Sackett, of Stanford University, has claimed that the human eye can see a single photon, the smallest amount of energy in the universe. It's a good thing too. Conservation of energy, eh? But no matter how far you move your head or lens up, down, left, or right, you can still see every point, as light emanates from every point, in every imaginable direction, until it is stopped by something opaque. Unlimited numbers of photons, traveling in unlimited numbers of directions, without interfering with each other. It almost makes my head explode!

The Amazing Gift keeps on giving. By the way, do you think light just fabricated itself, out of nothing - no direction, no Light Maker? It just "happened"? Pure "luck"? Ah the "rules of science." Sure, they all just fabricated themselves, also out of nothing, right? (wink, nudge) Unlike your ears, your eyes do not perform Fourier Analysis on light. For if they did, white light would be divided into components the way a prism does.

For a better understanding of what I mean, look briefly at another Amazing Gift, viz. hearing. Your eardrums t***smit a single wave function to your head, where every component sound is separated. This allows you to distinguish between the background music, the noise of typing your keyboard, and your spouse walking across the room. All these separate and quite disparate sounds merge into a single wave as the eardrum vibrates, until they are separated by a Fourier Analysis, much to our benefit and delight. It makes me tingly just to think about the pervasive beauties that surround and enrich us. But then again, I'm a touchy-feely kind of guy. Before leaving the subject of hearing, consider the fortuitous slow speed of sound, about .2 miles per second compared to 186,000 MPS for light. Only because sound is so slow can we have stereophonic hearing, where one ear hears a sound 1/10,000th of a second before the other ear and our brain calculates both direction and angle. Danger coming - from over there!

On and on, seemingly without limit, this Gift. It would be absolutely wonderful if light only t***smitted images, but no, it does a very great deal more than that. It t***smits energy, and heat, and information - all in prodigious amounts which we continue to explore with great success.
How? Why? Because life has been arranged tutorially. The basic necessities of life were simple to learn long ago. Food, water, shelter, the discovery of fire. With time, humans sought to learn, and boy did we learn. We have learned so much and so little that we still don't know everything about anything. (I'm pretty sure.)

The human optic nerve t***smits information at 4 gigabaud per second, many times faster than your cable or T1 line. How else could you hit an incoming tennis ball.

If I think of anything else, I'll return to add it to this thread. Meanwhile I ask those of you reading this to please add facts or comments on light. We should all be in the business of learning together.

I'll finish with a joke. What did the photon say to the bartender?
Nothing! Photons can't talk, they just wave.

In studio, I almost always place my main light high and off-center to get the most flattering light. Any light at the camera is usually a fill. When I was learning, my teacher, who was a pro photog with CBS, had a bracket that put the strobe up and to the left. I went down and found that bracket at the local store--no problem.

But now, it seems the norm is directly over the lens and a little high. This produces "butterfly" lighting, which is not flattering to most people (It is great for young gorgeous actresses). I use it because the brackets all come that way--and maybe everyone else knows something I don't. . . I know that's unlikely, but possible. :-)

I also use a GF Lightsphere--have for years--better than the other half-dozen light modifiers I've tried.

But come on, sisters and brothers of the optical glass, enlighten me.

Working with ACR 9 and PSElements 13, I am undecided about when to sharpen in the workflow.
ACR allows work in 12-bit mode, but one can't see the final PSE PP until after conversion to 8-bit in PSE (I can't do 16-bit).
At the moment, I shoot raw, camera neutral, and set ACR to Adobe 2012 and Camera Neutral, with everything on the sharpening page set to zero.
I think that sharpening in ACR might be best, but find it also adds noise when in PSE (I might have other confusions, such as sharpening again in PSE).
Suggestions and examples welcome.

You want to go LEE. The adapter screws on and the filters clips on. The Cokin screws on and then you have to insert the filter. If you lens has any creep to it, pushing the filter into the holder will change the distance and perspective.

With a 10 stop ND, you really can't see anything through the lens. With a Lee, I can clip the filter on or off in a second and readjust if necessary. With the Cokin, it is push in and off and it can be a hassle. The Lee adapters are metal, the Cokin are plastic. The Cokin filters are plastic, the Lee are scratch resistant resin. Cokin will scratch by just taking them in and out of their plastic cases. There is more distortion with Cokin than Lee. I use my filters when ever I am near any water, and that is often.