A Quick Guide to Adding Props to Your Green Screen Photoshoot

Props can be a photographer’s best friend or worst enemy. Here is how to make the best use of props while shooting on a green screen background, so you can get your subjects to feel at ease and save yourself some precious time in post-production.

Accessories are a fixture of school and sports photography. From graduation diplomas to soccer balls, props are a good way to standardize a shoot.

Using props can also be useful to make your subject comfortable, especially when photographing young children. Pupils are no different than the majority of adults: most of them simply don’t know what to do with their hands when posing for a picture.

Getting your models to hold something can instantly make them look more relaxed and natural. Having some classic poses in the back of your head and knowing how to better direct your subjects, especially children, can also get you much better results. Here are some tips!

Notebooks, backpacks and signs indicating the names and grades of the students are all good examples of useful accessories to slip in your bag. An empty board is also a great idea, since you can use the same one for your entire shoot and add the information needed in post-production. 

Getting students to sit behind a desk is also a good idea, which illustrates another virtue of props: making your final pictures look more realistic.

If you are photographing students and you know that you are going to use a background that illustrates, say, a classroom, giving them accessories that fit in that environment will make your pictures lifelike. 

The trick is choosing your accessories wisely, so it will interfere as little as possible with your post-production work after the shoot is done. 

For example, when having your subject strike a pose with flowers, make sure that the flowers stay in front of your subject. If the bouquet goes over the edge of their body, it will make for longer editing in post-production.

The same goes for green or reflective props: dealing with them in post-production is not impossible, but it might induce some self-loathing and useless overtime. Check out our Tips for Shooting with Props blog post for more tips about this. 

A good use of accessories, combined with 36Pix’s extraction software, should help you process high volume green screen photoshoots much faster. 

And don’t forget that we at 36Pix are always here to answer all of your questions about green screen extraction software. Enjoy the school year!