The Complete Commercial Photographer

Lesson 16: Page 01

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We now return to advanced techniques for studio products. This lesson will include different approaches and techniques for lighting and capturing products. Some of these techniques may actually be easier…

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This diagram shows the lighting layout for the cheese, book, and CD. One overhead light box and another small light box in front to fill in the shadows.

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THE CAMERA This is an example of shiny plastics and the solving of some problems that happen with many shiny products that need to be knocked out. Knowing the client…

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I used two large light boxes, one on each side of the camera for lighting to create highlights and shadows and show the texture of the product. The image on…

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SMALL SETS For this setup, I wanted a Hallmark feel to the images. I started with a folding table and some shiny yellow wrapping paper spread across it for the…

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Other Light Modifiers There are other ways you can manipulate your light. In this case, I used glass blocks, the same that you may find an entire wall made from…

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The trick is moving the lights around until the light is perfectly even across the art with no reflections on the art itself. This should work for you, but let’s…

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Small Sets You can create an amazing amount of realistic scenarios in the smallest of shooting spaces. The idea is to not have to go to a real location, particularly…

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In another set requested by Nike, they wanted a trail scene where we could photograph their trail running shoes. I came up with the idea of setting up a fake…

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I feathered it back and forth until I had the desired brightness for the cedar branches. My second light was an extra small light box on camera left to light…

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There is a white fill card on the left side to bounce into the side as well. The background is a blue seamless paper and the light is a small…

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When using mono lights and depending on the brand, they will fire when there is no PC cord plugged into them and the Photocell sees the main light flash. On…

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THE LIGHT TENT There is a very useful tool for product photographers and it is called the light tent. There are many of these on the market and their primary…

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In this next photo, we used the same setup, but I adjusted the lighting to compliment this necklace. You will find, there is no one formula for every product and…

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Managing your highlights

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This image was also photographed for the same client. The difference in this image is I placed a piece of black paper with a series of narrow slits cut in…

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Do you have an EGO? If you do not have an Ego you should. These can be beneficial to your images, your body of work, and you career. Now before…

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In the ad layout (like the Sunday newspaper ads) the background around the bottle was selected in Photoshop using the Magic Wand tool and then refined with the lasso tool….

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The background light was a small box on the floor pointed at the wall. For this previous photo I also used the technique explained in Boring Products earlier in the…

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REFLECTED PLEXI Occasionally you will have a client who wants to shoot on a surface where their product reflects nicely and that is the case here. As you can see…

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   Now that I have cleared the white background I duplicate that layer twice.

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Next, I use the Opacity slider for the shadow layer and reduce it to 50% and the shadow appears more faint and pleasing.