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This is a followup post to Product protography – white seamless backgrounds.
When creating isolated product photos, you end up with a photo that isn’t connected to its environment via a shadow, but a reflection can look very cool. The problem in keeping the reflection when using the technique shown in the previous article is that if you dodge out the white background it’s allmost impossible not to paint over and affect the reflection of the subject. You could mask it, but that takes to much time.. now what?
I’ve tried a number of techniques for getting perfect seamless 100% “blown” backgrounds. Most people use seamless paper, a roll of paper hanging so it curves, before comming up with a better way, this was what I used, but often it doesn’t get the results I wanted.
Here’s what you need to create perfect white seamless backgrounds for product photography.
I have been having an annoying problem with my product shots lacking good contrast so I had to do it in post. I just got a set of bardoors for my setup, a very cool set with a honeycomb grid and 4 gels from the danish photography and studio lighting shop Flash og Fotobutikken
I put on the set of barndoors and took a couple test shots. Like magic I had more contrast because I could now block the family of angles from the lights. I use diffusion panels exclusively, (sod softboxes, pain in the ass to setup, takes up space and are expensive) and a lot of times the camera can “see” the reflectors on the heads causing glare.
So it seems that my contrast problem was simply flare biting me in the ass. (Again, grrr) but with the barndoors this is a thing of the past. Also nice that I can stop spill on walls and ceiling, I get better colors now to, since I don’t have reflections from the walls and ceiling bouncing off colors back into the scene anymore.
If you have taken a look at some of the backgrounds you can purchase you will have noticed that they are realy expensive. You can make your own studio backgrounds with painters canvas for cheap and they will be extremely durable and tough.
If you don’t know, barndoors are a set of 4 flaps on hinges that you can pull up in front of your flash heads to control your light with great presicion.
It’s important to remember that specular highlight is basically a mirror of your lightsource.
If you put up a mirror so it reflects your light the inverse square law is not in effect for the mirror (The speculars become smaller, but does not lose intensity). No matter if the light is close to the mirror, or far away it will reflect the light at the same intensity.
There is a very important clue here… Specular hightlight intensity never changes no matter the relative distance to the light, but diffused light does.
So moving the light further away from the subject makes specular hightlights even more intense because you see them relative to the diffused light. Moving the lights say douple the distance will make the diffused light 1 stop darker, yet the specular highlights will be at the same intensity, just smaller.
So moving you lights closer to the subject will make the specular hightlights less harsh because the diffused light is now brighter relative to the specular hightlights.
Here’s a couple tips I use when doing product and tabletop photography to get the maximum image quality.
I’m currently gnawing my way though the amazing book Light Science and Magic and finally learned how to light glass and glass objects using a technique called Bright Field and Dark Field Lighting.
Don’t have an expensive Sekonic Flash incident meter?
Not to worry, here’s a super tip to get your lighting ratios set quickly.
Tie a string to the flash head somewhere, important, we want it so it moves with the flash head up and down.
Every time you shoot something, take the string and roll it out to reach where you focus on the subject, tie a knot there or mark it some other way. write down the flash settings and camera aparture. After a while you will have all your useuall distances marked so you can just look up what you need, roll out the string again and voila, ready to rock. If your other heads are the same type just make an identical copy of the string and tie it to the other lights.
You could also measure with a ruler or something if you don’t want strings dangling from your heads. Not wery pro, but if you’r doing product shots this works great.
I been wanting to get into product and stock photography for a while and yesterday I pulled the trigger on a Bowens strobe kit.
 Bowens esprit gemeni 250w kit
I just got my Sigma EM-140 DG Ringflash and a set of Kelko extension rings to play around with macro photography.
I started out with just the large 36mm extension ring. As this was my first foray into extension rings I was quite surprised at how close I needed to get with just the 36mm ring on my Canon EF-S USM 85mm 1.8. That lens useually manages to annoy me sometimes because you have to be so far back to focus on anything. Not so now, I need to be about 10cm tops to focus.
I quickly learned that auto focus is right out hehe. The area of focus is so shallow that even breathing is enough to blurr the area you want to focus on, good thing I started out with just the 36mm and not the whole set.
The Sigma EM-140 DG Ringflash works amazingly well, no harsh shadows as you’d normally get with on camera flash. The great thing about the Sigma EM-140 DG Ringflash is that it will trigger my other EF DG-500 Super flash wireless, haven’t played with that yet though.
If you have a Canon camera, and thought that the USB connection was only for transferring photos, you are missing out on one of the coolest features of your camera.
DSLR Remote Pro is a program that you install on your PC, that can control most of the features on your camera. Even the budget cameras such as the 350D, although you miss a few of the non-essential features on the smaller models, like selecting focus points DSLR Remote Pro still allows you to do things you would never be able to on the camera itself.
The ExpoDisc is a device that you put in front of your lense, snap a shot directy at your lightsource from the view of the subject, then you just select that shot in your camera as the custom white balance and voila, perfect neutral colors and no need to fiddle in post or RAW converter.
The only problem is ExpoDisc’s are bloody expensive.
The Zone System, developed by Ansel Adams is the most important thing I ever learned in photograhy, and I urge any new photographer to learn it to.
Knowing how to use the Zone System means that you can look at any scene and expose the important parts just how you like them. No more over or under exposed images, no more blown highlights or clipped shadows, unless you want to do that of course. The important thing is that the Zone System puts you in charge, not your camera.
Here’s a cool trick to know if you can’t afford to buy 3-4 flashes to create elaborate lighting setups. It only works for scenes with no movement, like backgrounds.
This is a fun little trick. With a lens with low aparture, like 1.8 you can get realy blurred backgrounds. The blobby spots for lack of a better word, oh wait… it’s called bokeh, take shape from the lens blades. The more blades the smoother bokeh.
What if you could take all those little spots (Caused by lighter parts of your image) and make them any shape you wanted? Well you can.
Open the lens all the way up, as low aparture as you can get.
Find some black thick paper and cut any shape you like, try with a heart shape for example. The size of the cutout has to be smaller than the aparture opening so just check the front of your lens to see how big the hole is.
Stick the paper cutout in front of the lens and snap away and check out all those little bokeh hearts, cool eh?
High end flashes like Sigma EF DG-500 Super has many great options that unfortunately is never used by new photographers. One such feature is Second Curtain Flash.
Your digital SLR camera has 2 curtains that act in sync when you take a photo. When you press the shutter release the first curtain opens up and stays up for as long as the exposure time, and then the second curtain comes down, closing the lens to end the exposure.
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