Better than V-Flats: How to use a paravent in Photography - Part 1

If you’re a budding portrait photographer, you don’t really need to drain your budget on a whole slew of backdrops for your shoots. The idea in today’s video is using a paravent or "Spanish wall" as a background for your portrait photo. I would like to walk you through a very simple way of creating an awesome backdrop at your home in a very small space. First, get a simple white Spanish wall which is approximately 6.5 feet / 2 meters high and wide from either a department store or order online through eBay, Amazon, etc.



How to use the Spanish Wall as a backdrop

Set up your Spanish wall in an L-shape. Also, on the off chance that you can place it specifically at another wall, it gets an additional level of steadiness which will help when the model is leaning on the Spanish wall.



The Spanish wall in my video has 5 segments. It will wind up with one longer side and one shorter side when arranged in an L-shape. You can use both sides for shooting. And furthermore, you can simply rearrange it in an instant if you wish. So, don’t stress over the quantity of segments that your Spanish wall has.

How to set up the light

If you have a dim floor, brighten it by laying a bit of white fabric or something white onto the floor. This will reflect light from the floor up to the model and additionally empower the floor to be in the frame if you have scenes where the model is taking a seat on the floor.


The lighting and camera is set up according to the standard GL Method. If you checked out the free guide linked above, then you know exactly what to do. You use a shoot-through umbrella and a speedlight shooting into the center of the corner. The speedlight is on 1/16th power, and your camera setup is as usual: 1/200s, f/2.8, ISO 100. This setup and a Spanish wall is perfect for both color and black & white photos.

Get hold of a simple, white Spanish wall and try out the photoshoot that’s shown in this video. This prepares you for the next video where I am going to add a very simple prop to this setup. It will make it much more versatile.

Make sure you are subscribed to my list to get notified and to download my free guide before heading into your shoot: https://glm.tips/downloads 

You may also like: 8 Warm-Up Poses from the GL Method of Flash Photography

Text, image and video thanks to Good Light! Clips

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