Hello,
I am trying to take a picture with a black background - I am using a black cotton sheet to try and photograph my new born baby with my husbands hands holding her. What settings are recommended? Right now the sheet is showing up with all its wrinkles etc... Maybe I am using the wrong lighting? Wrong settings? Thanks.

Don't know about settings but I use a folding black fiberboard that I got at Ben Franklin and which are probably available at any arts/crafts store. It folds and open is about 3 feet by 4 feet and cost 4 or 5 dollars. No wrinkles, easy to stand up as the folding sections on the ends can be used to prop it up. Flat black so it doesn't reflect light.

get your subject away from the background. 6-8 feet and try not to shed too much light on it. Open up your aperture some so your DOF isn't so deep.

Will get you results like this .... (the lighting I used is more dramatic than what you will be doing - but I think this is what you are looking to do .... )

http://www.quast-family.com/albums/steve3-14-08/part1.jpg

Distance between your subject and the background (along with a moderate aperture, like possibly f5.6) will help it be out of focus and hide the wrinkles. More distance is better but will require a bigger room and bigger background. This will also help keep light on the subject off the background. Another trick is to mist hot water on it. Get a spray bottle, like a clean windex bottle, and fill it with hot tap water. It won't take everything out but will make a difference for the camera. Also, black velvet is (as far as I know) the darkest black you'll find for a background.

Make sure not to use an automatic exposure mode because if you do the camera will overexpose the background, turning it gray.

Be sure to meter off the baby's face. This should give you a decent exposure.

you could always iron the sheet.....

you could always iron the sheet.....

You could, but if it's close enough to the subject it'll still look like a sheet. If you "steam" (using what I said above) the sheet and have enough distance it'll look great.

As far as metering off the baby's face, that would be a good technique to use if you're not using flash. If you are, you could do this if you had studio strobes and a flash meter but I'm guessing that's not the case. This is again where subject to background distance will help.

Sounds like you're getting good advice so far, but don't forget two main factors affecting tone are exposure and contrast.

For any given exposure, increasing contrast will make your whites whiter and your blacks blacker (oh, sounds like an ad for laundry detergent!).

So, if you're close, just playing with the image contrast in a program like photoshop might be enough to get you there...

You'll like a dedicated ambient light meter because just about any camera (even a d3) will suffer trying to meter with a black background. Try using off camera flash with some kind of diffuser (or on camera flash with a sheet of mylar film held in front to soften the light). Diffused light will give you more even lighting. Or even better bounce the flash off of the ceiling and also use off camera flash positioned so that it will illuminate the shadows caused by the wrinkles. If you have a Nikon buy an SB-600 or an SB-800... use your on camera flash to run the corresponding flash externally. Remember to use photoshop to fix everything up.