Cool Paper Photography Tricks

Cool Paper Photography Tricks to try at home – Watch on YouTube

A simple sheet of paper can unlock a world of photographic possibilities! In this tutorial, we’re looking at some cool paper photography tricks to try at home!

Cool Paper Photography Tricks to try at home

We’re always on the lookout for simple and easy photography projects to try out at home. Paper is one of those macro subjects that everyone has access to and is fun to play around with.

Don’t worry, you don’t have to be too crafty, we’re not making origami. We’re using paper to trick the eye and create a scene in front of the camera that looks colourful and eyecatching!

Paper has the unique property of being completely flat. This makes it very interesting for creating illusions in front of the camera. It can also have other characteristics like being coloured or slightly transparent.

Lets look at some of the ways we can use paper in our photography…

Paper Photography Backgrounds

Let’s start with the most obvious. You can use a simple sheet of white paper to create a white or grey background for your images! This is great if you are trying to create that “white background” product photography look on a budget.

When you’re shooting macro and close up photography, a simple sheet of A4 or A3 paper is more than big enough to cover the background of your image. It’s even common to see full size studios utilising paper for their portraiture backgrounds. It’s cheap and disposable, so it doesnt matter if it gets dirty or scuffed up!

Adjust your lighting with Paper

Paper can be an invaluable tool for adjusting your lighting. Theres a few ways you can use paper to change the look of a scene.

Diffusion

We mentioned earlier that one of the properties of paper is that it can sometimes be slightly translucent. Depending on the quality of the paper and the strength of your lighting, a simple sheet of white paper can make for a great diffusion material!

This is especially true with macro photography. With powerful lighting light, the Adaptalux Studio a sheet of paper can make for a nice, large diffusion surface.

We’ve used paper in the past to create “diffusion tunnels” by bending the paper over the subject. The flexible nature of the paper makes it easy to manipulate and place into clamps!

Reflection

Reflection is a key principal when it comes to understanding how light works. Light bounces off objects and lighter objects reflect more! What do we have that is usually a nice shade of white?

That’s right, paper makes for a fantastic reflector. If you’re not sure how to use a reflector, this is also a great way to learn. Set up a simple scene with a single light source and try to bounce the light back into the scene using a sheet of paper. It’s great for filling in shadows or creating the illusion of a second light source when you don’t have one!

Using a reflector in this way also diffuses the light, so you get nice soft light bouncing into your scene and all it took was a sheet of paper!

Creative Paper Photography

Ok, enough with using paper as a tool, what can we do to make paper the subject? Well, there are plenty of ways to incorporate cool paper photography tricks into the images themselves. Let’s start with creating illusions!

Paper is flat, and usually rectangular. This makes it ideal for creating geometric illusions. We will come to some more complex folds and techniques in a moment, but let’s start with something simple…

Placing two sheets of coloured paper or card down onto a surface can create the illusion of another surface! The trick is getting the right angle. The bottom sheet of paper should be a darker shade of the top one to simulate shade. Place one of the edges so it points down from the cameras’ perspective, and perhaps an object on the top surface.

The camera angle is important here too, and a black background helps to sell the illusion. A lower camera angle makes the table seem flatter, while being higher up makes it look like you are standing above the table. Looking down from the top breaks the illusion unless you can change the 90 degree angle of the paper corner.

Abstract Paper Photography

If you want to make your photos all about paper, there’s a way to do that too! Paper interacting with light can make beautiful abstract photos that can baffle and bewitch the viewer.

The simple principle is to shoot down from above, onto the edges of the paper, using coloured paper or coloured light to change the way the light bounces around the scene.

We’re also using a sheet of paper as a background, and diffusion in this example!

We have a full tutorial on how to do this kind of paper photography, so if you want a step by step guide, head over to our article and video Beautiful Abstract Paper photography Tutorial.

Let us know if you have any other cool paper photography tricks that you use at home. Paper is so versatile that there really are endless possibilities for what you can do with it!

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