Operating Room Production Shoot

Spent the day with the crew from the office doing still photography for a new program on infection control for anesthesiologists. Apart from the requisite product photography, I had a chance to do some available light portraiture.

A few favorite images from the day:

Special thanks to my good friend Bob A. for the loaner of the D3 / 14-24 combo.  Still haven’t quite decided if you’re gonna get it back!  I may have to part with it slowly!

More images from the shoot in my gallery here.

Thanks for dropping by!

Product Photography on a Budget: Part 2

In my last post, I showed you a quick and inexpensive solution for tabletop product photography that used just a couple table lamps and a piece of posterboard. Stepping up from that option just a bit, we can add a little diffusion to our light source for smoother wrap-around lighting and softer shadows.

Quick and Portable with Diffusion:
Shoot-through umbrellas or softboxes are terrific for diffusing your light.  But for even more versatility for shooting other tabletop products (particularly shiny stuff like plastic, metal, or jewelry), you might consider investing in a small light tent. My favorite is this one for about $50 from Calumet Photographic. At a little over 30 inches cubed, my 24 x 24-inch acrylic bases fit perfectly inside.  It’s portable and small enough that I can set it up in most any space. It’s translucent white fabric and provides nice even diffusion without imparting any color cast.  And it folds up like one of those spring loaded windshield shades to a disc about 12 inches in diameter, so it’s easy to store when I need to make room on the dining room table!

I use my posterboard or acrylic bases just as with previous examples.  In the above example, the posterboard is gaffer-taped to the back wall of the tent. As with our previous posterboard / table lamp example,  you’ll probably want one light for your subject, and a second for the background.  Aimed at the sides of the tent, the fabric does a wonderful job of spreading and diffusing the light, giving you a huge light source resulting in soft shadows and gorgeous wrap around coverage.  As an added benefit, if you’re shooting shiny stuff like glass or metal, the enclosed tent helps to minimize reflections from the space around you.  Though it’s not shown in the setup photo above, this tent comes with a removable front panel with a slit for your lens, so you could completely envelope your subject in beautiful soft light with no reflections!

If you use colored posteboard for the backdrop, and black acrylic for the base, you can do something like this:

Again, with continuous lights, you can adjust the light-to-subject distance and direction until you get the look you want, and evaluate as you go. What you see is what you get.  Even outdoors in bright sun you’ll have nice, soft wrap around light: one of the keys to professional results with your product photography.

There’s no magic formula for successful product photography.  Each subject will dictate the lighting scheme that produces the best look. But the beauty of digital photography is that you can shoot, evaluate the result and adjust right away until you get the look you want.  There’s no penalty for taking a lot of pictures. So experiment!  And when you find a setup that works for you, stick with it, and tweak it a little each time until you consistently get the results you want.

Thanks for dropping by!

Tabletop Product Photography on a Budget: Part 1

Hi Friends,

I posted recently on my typical setup for tabletop product photography using a light table, a pair of hotshoe flash units, and an octagonal softbox. It works really well for me, and since I usually leave it set up, it’s quick to arrange a couple of items on the set, shoot, process, and upload to web.

I received a number of questions and requests for suggestions for a less technical (read – “less expensive”) alternative to my strobe / light table configuration. To that end, this is the first of a two-part series on professional tabletop photography on the cheap (or at least, the “not expensive”).

Quick and Portable:
The simplest setup is a piece of white posterboard and a pair of continuous lights: in this case, a floor lamp and a gooseneck clamp light that I happened to have in the garage. No diffusion…just straight, unfiltered light.   I keep a selection of colored background papers that I’ve picked up at our local craft supply store in a hardboard artist’s portfolio, and when opened to about 90-degrees, the portfolio makes a great tabletop studio.  Simply tape one end of the posterboard to the vertical side of the portfolio, and leave a gentle curve at the back of the set so the horizon disappears (i.e., no visible corners). Set it up on a table or chair, et voila: instant studio!  If you don’t want to monkey with lights, you can setup your “studio” outside in bright shade and have beautiful soft light.

For a little reflection, use either shiny posterboard, or lay a thin (~1/8 inch) piece of clear acrylic, plexiglas, or lexan over the “floor” of your tabletop set, and shoot from a low camera angle:

The nice thing about continuous lighting is that you can see exactly where the shadows and hotspots are before you shoot, and move the lights or your subject matter accordingly.  When you’re first starting out with auxiliary lighting, continuous lights just make it a little easier to see what you’re doing.  One note of caution, however.  Continuous lighting is sometimes referred to as “hot lighting,” and for good reason.  If you’re using halogen or household tungsten bulbs, they can get pretty hot, and even burn your background if they come in contact. So, be careful with the proximity of the lights to your set.  If possible, you might consider compact florescent (CFL) bulbs.  They’re usually not as bright, but they’re much cooler:

Speaking of “not as bright”… Since you’ll want to turn your camera’s built in flash off, and given that continuous lighting is not as bright or intense as flash, you’ll probably find yourself shooting at slower shutter speeds.  For that reason, you’ll want to shoot with your camera on a tripod and use your self-timer to avoid touching the camera during the exposure and the resultant blurred images due to camera shake.

There’s no magic formula for successful product photography.  Each subject will dictate the lighting scheme that produces the best look. Experiment with the number and positions of your lights.  One of the greatest things about digital photography is that you can shoot, evaluate the result and adjust right away until you get the look you want.  When you find a setup that works for you, stick with it, and tweak it a little each time until you consistently get the results you want.

Hope this gets you started!  Feel free to comment or email me if I can offer specific suggestions.

Thanks for dropping by!

Product Photography: Avoiding the Funhouse Mirror Effect

Hi Friends,

Recently I was asked by one of my wife’s Stampin’ Up! friends and fellow blogger about distortion (“bowing”) she’d been noticing in her images of sample cards.  She showed me an example, and it looked something like this:

In geek code, this is known as “barrel distortion” (presumably because it looks like a wine barrel). Obviously, it’s more apparent when you’re photographing a subject with straight lines, like a card or papercraft sample.  But how does it happen, and more importantly, how can you avoid it in the first place?

The most likely culprit here is the camera’s wide angle lens setting.  I photographed these sample images with a compact point and shoot camera since that’s what many of us have access to.  Regardless of the type of camera though, the issue is related to shooting at the widest wide angle setting of your telephoto lens–usually the default zoom setting when you turn on a point and shoot camera–and moving the camera in close to the subject to fill the frame as much as possible. This close proximity to the subject exaggerates the natural distortion associated with wide angle lenses. So unless you like the funhouse mirror look (and it can be appropriate for SOME images), avoid closeup with wide angle:

To avoid barrel distortion, take a step back from your subject, and zoom in a little to fill the frame.  The telephoto setting eliminates the bowing / barrel distortion completely.  In these examples, by backing up as little as 18-24 inches from the sample card, and zooming in to fill the frame, resulting in the same basic composition as the wide angle / close-up, I was able to eliminate the barrel distortion caused by wide angle and close camera-to-subject distance.

And the result:

But what if your image is bowed, and you can’t go back and reshoot it? Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements provide a quick fix by way of the “Lens Correction” filter (“Correct Camera Distortion” in Elements).  I’ll show the Photoshop version here, but the Elements process is similar.

With the image open, choose FILTER > Distort > Lens Correction…

This opens your image in the Lens Correction filter dialog box, and shows an overlay grid that will provide a guide to knowing when you’ve straightened the bowed edges.

Drag the “Remove Distortion” slider a little to the right until the edges that are supposed to be straight align with the grid overlay.  Then click “OK” to apply the filter.  Save your image.

In summary, to avoid barrel distortion, back up from your image and use your camera’s zoom lens to zoom in and fill the frame with your subject.  Always best to get it right in camera than to have to fix it in Photoshop!

Hope that helps.  Feel free to add a comment or email me if I can answer any specific questions.

Thanks for dropping by!

Product Photography: High-Key Lighting with Reflections

Hi Friends,

Now that my wife’s blog is up and running at www.stampingpro.com (unabashed promotional hint), I find myself looking for a consistent way to shoot the product photos of her creative stamping and paper crafting projects.  Though I’ve used a variety of setups over time, I think I’ve finally settled on a look we like, and one that’s easy to reproduce.  Thought I’d share the setup and a few hints for high-key product photography.

High-key lighting is commonly used in product photography.  The bright white background directs your viewers right to the subject matter.  It’s typically bright, airy and clean looking, and relatively free of dark shadows. (Compare this to low-key lighting which is usually dark and moody).

The high key look is a function of the balance between the lighting of the subject (via the key light), and the background. Though you likely won’t actually measure the ratio with a light meter, high key lighting is usually in the ballpark of 1:1 ratio of the key light to the background light. (Compare to typical medium or low-key lighting where the background light can be significantly lower than the light on the subject).

It takes a lot of light to do high key lighting on a full size set because you need to throw an even wash of light over the entire background.  But for tabletop product photography, it’s pretty easy to achieve the look with just two lights.

I have two favorite setups for high-key tabletop lighting. One uses a frosted translucent acrylic base, and one a more reflective, but completely opaque, acrylic.

The translucent acrylic setup uses a 1/4 x 24 x 24-inch piece of frosted acrylic as the base (see below). This can be suspended over a pair of saw horses, or as in the image below, a professional shooting table. The key is to be able to light it from below.  Note: I use hotshoe flash units (Nikon Speedlights) for this, but you could do it with continuous lights as well.

The trick here is to bounce the light from below the table rather than illuminate it directly.  A piece of white foamcore from your local craft store works great. As you can see in the above image, the foamcore is positioned below the table at about 45-degrees.  The background / underlight is placed far enough behind the set that it illuminates the entire foamcore board, and even lights the translucent background sweep as well.

The key light is above and in front of the set. A diffuse light source works best.  I use a Nikon Speedlight in a 3-foot octagonal softbox or a shoot-thru umbrella for the key light, but whatever you use, remember to try to get the light as close as you can to your subject for the softest shadows.

With the frosted translucent acrylic alone, I get nice underlighting, but no reflection:

To provide a subtle, natural reflection, I add a thin (1/8-inch) piece of clear acrylic (readily available at your local home improvement store) over the translucent frosted acrylic.  You can see the edges of the clear acrylic extending over the sides of the table here:

Shooting at a low camera angle makes the reflection more apparent:

My other favorite reflective high-key setup uses a piece of opaque white acrylic:

Since this type of acrylic is opaque, you can’t light it from below.  A brightly lit white background provides nearly the same look.  In this case I hang a piece of white ripstop nylon (a couple bucks from my local fabric store) or a white flat bed sheet 6-8 feet behind the tabletop set.  (You can tell your friends it’s a professional seamless white photographic background if you want).  The key light is the same as the previous setup, but in this case I position the background light at about tabletop height behind the bedsheet background.

I’ve found that lighting the background from behind gives me a more intense, even light with a single light than I could achieve by lighting it from the front.  Hence, almost all of my high-key tabletop setups are backlit.

Aside from the bright, fresh look provided by the high-key lighting scheme, the other advantage of this setup is an uncluttered background.  Whether you use a similar setup for your product photography or not, your images will almost always have more impact if you shoot against a clean background.  So clear a space on your dining room table, and be selective in framing your image to avoid background distractions.

Hope this gives you a few ideas for your own product photography.  Feel free to email me or comment below if I can help you with specific questions.

Thanks for dropping by!

Jon