Lighting issues and creating the right ambience for the final pieces

In the photoshoot I have a number of issues with either too much light or too little. I needed to get the balance between the shadows being sharp enough (i.e. the background being dark enough) with the foreground being well lit. It was extremely difficult to do without making the images look amateur. 

 The lamp I was using was allowing too much light through, creating a large box shadow over my GOBO images. to solve this problem, I created a slotted shape gobo to go over the light. This was only the foreground of the box was lit. This was certainly a very amaeteur process. If this was the installation was my final piece, i would have invested more time making the light visually appearing rather than a lamp wrapped in black paper and masking tape.