I was using various softboxes for most of our product photography, but about a half a year ago I discovered a perfect use of translucent diffuser panels in product photography. I am talking about usually small product with glossy reflective surface with inevitable reflection form the lights on it.
The main difference between softbox and diffuser panel is how the light is spread on the “working” surface: good softbox is suppose to produce even flat light on its front screen while diffuser may have very different pattern, depending on how we highlight it. What does it mean for me when I shoot some glossy, especially dark glossy object? The reflection from that light.
Reflection will be very different: softbox always gives sharp-edged square while diffuser panel can produce very uneven, gradient filling. Gradient is the key: it can be round, square or linear, whatever I need to show on the object.
Below is the example images I’ve got while shooting line of cosmetic brushes for Anisa International. Managed by Anisa Tewlar, company makes high-quality cosmetic brushes and accessories, I am really glad to work with them.
Top-down shot of the black glossy brush, done with two softboxes on each side of the brush:
Yesterday I was buying 10 bottles of HEET (100% methanol) and distilled water for my car (who can guess why? ) at Walmart and accidentally noticed something very familiar while walking near kitchenware shells… It was like: did I shoot these? Yep!
It is still a little unusual feeling to see my own work in such places: it is like browsing incognito your own exhibition:-). I was smiling when shooting them on Droid X (BTW, surprisingly nice 8Mpx camera):
Rival toaster
This is about 10% of what we actually did for Walmart, the rest is still (my guess) in a creative packaging department. Continue reading »
This is what we shot for the catalog cover (the full catalog photo session are here and here), a close-up shot of one of the catalog boots. Customer wanted to show the boot on a cove and wanted to have the most rich, tasty and sexy (here I’ve run out of my English vocabulary :) look possible. They selected that high black rigid boot with their logo on the front to be shown, all on the black background.
Below is one of the images from this photo session:
I like to shoot products, working quietly in the studio, putting all my skills and creativity to get job done. There are three major types of product shots we are dealing with:
1. Sometimes ugly prototypes, where post-production and retouching may take ten times more efforts than photoshot itself. They are good challenge to work with, and it helps a lot:-)
2. Regular off the shell products, with shape and finish that can be very straight forward to shot or require hours of complicated setup built and very precise lighting to be done right.
3. Designers products, which are very unique and usually very interesting to work with.
In this article I’ll show our recent photoshot with a third, most enjoyable to work type of product.
I am talking about the photo-shot we had recently for Doug James (StudioDoug.com). He brought very interesting and unusual products of his studio to be photographed: LED tabletop lamps along with other cool stuff.
This is a second episode (the first one is here) from the “Water in product and advertisement photography” series. This time we used the same tank and mix of distilled and sparkling water.
The idea was simple: pouring objects into a water and shooting through the water tank, positioning camera strictly horizontal. Because we have used carbonated water, the tank must be 100% clean inside: every little piece of dirt on the glass will attract bubbles build-up.
The camera was perpendicular to the subject, meaning we did not need very deep DOF, aperture was set to F10. It was enough to have full object in a focus while blurring tank walls enough to hide occasional bubbles on it. For the same reason was used 180mm Macro lens: longer focus helped us separate the object from a tank walls.
Water in advertisement photography: the pepper and CO2 water.
This is a half a year old photo-shoot, but I would like to share the outcome here, the post is following this ONE. I was not able to release the details of the shot due to a restriction from a client, and now they seems to be OK with it
Shirley Corriher the one of our most enjoyable customers. This time she showed us how to cook. The previous 4 days photoshot was only about the food, and now we did few portraits in the kitchen as well.
As promised, here is the tutorial for what I call “underwater” product photography (not sure what the right name for this). We shoot several products, from fruits to a shampoo bottles, and now I am glad to show you the result.
Gold gel, one more light on the background
This is the most enjoyable photo-shot I had for last few month: not only the most technically challenging but the end result is the most eye-catching and outstanding. The idea was to use a water as a ultimate background to emphasize the product: water can be transparent or 100% reflective (well, not a water itself, but the water-to air boundary), the effect called total internal reflection. Long story short: when we see the water surface at relatively sharp angle, it become almost 100% reflective, acting as a mirror. Now, if we’ll disturb the water surface so it will form a waves, some part of the wave will be a mirror-like (due to an angle) , and some will be transparent, allowing light to be transmitted. Continue reading »
Glad to announce that we eventually got time to work on the tutorial for underwater splash product photography shoot. We’ll be doing behind the scene video and a blog post,:with all setup explained, including every little tips and tricks we used to get job done.
Here is the one of the images we did yesterday during the initial setup:
Underwater splash
under water studio photography: fruit splash
Today we’ll work on more sophisticated shoots. The stuff is really exiting to work on, very simple setup and lighting: it is simple, when you know how
I hope to finish everything by the middle of the week. This will be first tutorial from our long time planned “water photography” series, you better subscribe to our RSS feed now:-)
After we have successfully done a boots catalog photography for Refrigiwear, they decided to go with us on the rest of their 2010 catalog. This time we had a uniform 7+ hours photo-shoot with 4 models, about 30-40 outfits and four people (not counting photographer helping in a studio.
It was fun: Four ladies from Refrigiwear was helping Elite models to get dressed on heavy fireproof jackets, Mylène Farmer with her sexy music videos on a TV, humor, laugh and funny model’s faces at the end of each set.
The uniform we were shooting are made for work in a refrigerators and freezers, with temperature down to zero Fahrenheit. I was trying to keep studio cold, but guys still had a tough time wearing them. Modeling light was off for the most of the flashes, helping to minimize a heat in a studio. Several thousand watt-seconds of strobe flash every second or two did not help to stay models cool either:-)
At the and of the day we’ve got over 1100 images for a proofs gallery, I was tired and happy: I love this feeling after tough, but well done job.
Ok, now the studio lighting setup:
I was using excessive amount of strobes, this is what I always like to do: more lights gives me better control over the whole scene.
For example, I prefer to have a shoot-through light instead of only reflector, when possible: it works like a reflector on low power, but easily can go beyond that, when needed.
Working on our latest assignment, a catalog shoot for Refrigiwear, I decided to show how proper lighting can make a big difference by using one of the boots from the catalog as an example.
The object I’ve selected is a simple to photograph. Really simple.
Why?
Because it has well visible texture, and does not have highly reflective or transparent surfaces. Nothing similar to this, right?
However, having an easy to shoot object does not mean you should not worry about the lighting. It is so easy to do a crappy image just because it looks “nice” as is, with one light source, for example. Believe me, I am not against simple lighting schema, but more lights gives me more control over the look of the subject, just need to narrow them down.
Here I am going to show you how each additional light source will change the look of the boot and explain why I need it.
Let’s start from this well textured boot and only one light in front-top of it (White Lightning BD in my case), see the lighting setup:
August 2nd, 2010 | 
) at Walmart and accidentally noticed something very familiar while walking near kitchenware shells… It was like: did I shoot these? Yep!
