To get crisper shadows you need to turn down light radius to some thing like .3 and shadow rays to say 5 and see how you get on................dave Also see this tutorial (I think by Jay) so you can just get the shadows for the bachground https://simplymaya.com/forum/showthread.php?t=34936 Sorry mate, you're misunderstanding me. It's not the "blurriness" of the shadows I'm interested in, they're blurry the way I like it. It's the fact that on the Use Background object, they're way too light, and when compositing the image on something else, the shadows look white, not black. In the video tutorial above, his shadows are pitch black, but the difference is that Maya is then rendering on an image plane, and I am rendering to transparency... Not sure whether that makes a difference. I tried changing my lighting to directional light like he used, but no change. If you look at my images again, you'll see that the shadows are darker on the newspaper than they are on the ground. That's the difference I'm talking about.