There is this company that I’ve been looking at for a while, and I finally bit the bullet and bought the product. It is called Replica Surfaces®, and it is a small, woman owned business (woohoo). The idea is, you can create a backdrop using their square (23″ x 23″) hyper-realistic surfaces.
I really enjoy photography as a hobby, particularly food photography, so I bought these since I don’t have any nice surfaces to take photos of food on at home. I spent a lot of time deciding which surfaces I wanted to buy, as I got two of them for the surface and backdrop, and I had a tough time deciding which would look good together! They do give you a recommendation of what surfaces work well together, but it still took a lot of musing over for me!
After much debate, I settled on White Marble and Plaster. I bundled my items to get the stand to hold them up/together for free, and I used a coupon code that the browser add-on Honey found for me. These aren’t the cheapest products, so I was super happy that I was able to spend less than I originally had planned 🙂
There are many more replica surfaces out there, but my searches concluded that this brand was superior for a couple of reasons.
- They are hard, rigid surfaces instead of being rolled up. This is great because everything will be flat- you won’t have to worry about curled edges etc and so you have a greater amount of space to photograph on.
- You can easily wipe off any spills (haven’t tried red wine and products that coullld stain yet though).
- Portable! Yes they take up more space because they don’t roll up, but something about them just being large flat square makes it easier than a rolled up backdrop. No rolling up, no worried about it getting squished. Just grab and go! (You can also order a carrying case for them- which I don’t think I will do but it is an option)
I don’t have any fancy lighting, I just plop myself near a window, so I took these photos around 3pm when the light was not harsh. In these photos I used the plaster as the backdrop and the marble as the floordrop (I’m making up words here). I also edited them a bit afterwards with Lightroom, and the result is below!
So, if you are into photography and want to up-your game a little bit, these could be of use! You also don’t need to use food, they work great for flat lays, clothing, jewelry, etc!
