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It’s snowing outside so I decided to take pictures of objects inside.

After getting yelled at for also-capable-of-shooting-crap, I had to redeem myself. It’s snowing outside this time of year and it’s freezing, so what better thing to do than sit in front of the heater with a cup of hot chocolate… OR, you can spend your time experimenting and trying to shoot some ‘decent’ product photo’s which was exactly what I decided to do! Duh…

The Orange Set Up
I still had this very orange Gameboy Advance SP (which I bought ages ago) with a light metallic finish and though it’b a nice object for a lickable-glossy product photo. I chose bright orange A4 (didn’t have any other sizes anyways) paper with a slight structure to serve as a background. I knew I wanted to give it a advertising-ish look but didn’t really have a clear idea how to set up the lighting, so I just started to build and judging from where I thought light should come from. I started with the background light first, it seems logical. Your background is your canvas, so get that right first.

After some tweaking with the background light I put in my main light followed with a highlight. My softbox main light was actually way too big for anything that can fit between two sheets of A4 paper so I didn’t had to worry about too many deep shadows since the light would wrap around the small object anyway. After some moving around of the lights, adding some fill cards and flags my overall set up was complete, the rest was just fine tuning. One thing is for sure, shooting objects requires different lighting rules than let’s say creating a set up for a portrait. Objects are often shiny and slight changes in angles and light effects the final image far more than if you were shooting a person.

About Flags
Light modifyers do a great job delivering light where it should fall, sometimes it over-delivers and spills light where you don’t want it to reach. In these situations we want to cover up that ‘excess light’ using something to block it. These things are called flags and are nothing more than small (depending on how much you want to block) black cards and can be made (or bought) from anything like black cardstock or foamcore board to whatever keeps that excess light from spilling. This action of effectively blocking excess light is called flagging. Black is used because it absorbs light, you don’t want to use a white flag bouncing light around and still accidentally spilling excess light on your object.

The White Set Up
I let a friend choose a color theme, though I personally wanted warm yellow, he choose white, and we all know photographing white is one of the hardest things. I don’t know why but I wanted to achieve feathersoft light with almost no shadows, but combine that with all white objects on a white background and you got yourself a real challenge. One of the challenges was keeping the structure of the white (offwhite) paper visible. My main light which I triple diffused threw such soft light it instantly wiped out most shadows and contrast detail. Because I wanted the background paper’s structure to be visible I had to counter it with a hard background light skimming across the the background paper. Compare the background paper with the paper the objects are resting on (in final photo), one is smooth as silk and the other is structured yet they are the same paper.

The Blue Set Up
For the blue set up I chose a glass object holding liquid. Glass and liquid are highly reflective so keeping unwanted reflections as well as showing the clarity of the liquid is not easy. There are a couple of ways to photograph liquid in a bottle and lighting from underneath is one way. I chose the same structured paper as before but in blue and cut 2 holes the same size as the bottles out of the bottom sheet. I’ve put the bottles on top of the holes, brought in a light and had it flash from underneath lighting up the liquid and the edges of the glass bottle. Lighting this way though, will light up even the smallest dust particle, so best to wipe off your object using static wiping cloth. I also made a cookie for the background light to give it some shape, though the cookie was a bit too small and adding diffused background light didn’t give it the contrast and intensity I hoped for.

So how did the photo’s turned out you’re wondering right? If you ask me, I will tell you honestly I’m not exactly satisfied (as I never am). Apart from tons of technical mistakes, it just doesn’t cut it for me (I’m VERY nitpicky). I guess I wanted more of an edge but didn’t quite deliver, even though I put a lot of time and effort in it. Well, I’ll just let you decide, be gentle!

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