Originally posted by violaferenc I am beginner at using flashes and strobes. I was trying to take photo of parfume bottle with the black background. With 0,4/f11 the bottle was perfect, but the background was grey. I wanted to increase the shutter speed in order to get darker background, something like low key photo. And then it happened - several photos with different shutter speed , all pretty much the same.
ah! That makes things so much clearer. :-)
Yes, shutter speed will affect *ambient* light. Shutter will not affect most *flash* light, because flash is often faster than your possible shutter speed.
For motionless objects in a studio, this is a more straight forward task (although not necessarily easy) since you should have near complete control of your environment.
You are likely using enough (too much?) flash that the background is also being flood-lit by your flash.
You need to find a way to prevent your flash from lighting the background.
Many potential solutions, you need to figure out what will work. Just couple of options....
1) Move the background further away (look up "Inverse Square Law" with regard to light getting dark faster as you move away from the source.)
2) "Flag" or block off the light from the flash so it does not shine on the background.
3) Use some light modifier (soft box, grid, etc...) to limit where the light falls
4) Change the angle of the flash to keep the light from shining on the background
also, think of putting up black walls around your studio area to prevent flash from bouncing off walls, cabinets, or anything else in the room.
This might result in needing the flash being placed very close to your object (barely out of frame) at a lower power, and your background being a few feet away.
This in turn may result in your needing more lights to properly light all angles of your object.... and you're collection of lighting equipment grows, and grows and grows..... :-)