Both shooting “huge quilts” (10′-6″ x 8′-0″) and a whole bunch of them. I photographed 16 quilts this weekend for two different quilters. I put together some time lapse videos of the shoots. There’s a two-minute abridged version of the setup & two quilts:

Short Form Movie

And a longer five-minute version that shows a lot more of the pre-shoot setup and three quilts:

Long Form Movie

You get to see largely how much work (and pinning) goes into photographing quilts nicely and evenly. The two main lights I’m using are AlienBees B800’s with muslin socks to even out the light. The smaller light is a Nikon Speedlight SB-600 and was mostly on the floor to provide texture in the wide shots, or on a stand to one side to bring out the texture in the close up shots.

The big board things I’m hanging in the beginning are 4′x10′ homasote covered flats, which are then wrapped in batting and a slightly fuzzy fabric. We then cover these with a 128″ wide seamless grey fabric. The batting and homasote let us pin right into the backdrop, and it worked great (this was the first shoot we were trying this method).

I typically shoot quilts upside down. This is because I want the texture light to be coming from “above”, but it’s hard to hang a light up there and control it in this space. What I do is hang the quilt upside down, then light from below (which is the top of the quilt), and then flip the image when I process it. Occasionally something on the quilt won’t permit this, but on most quilts it’s a fine way to photograph them.

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