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?

First open the image in Photoshop. Jump the background layer (Control+J)
Hit control+t and context click inside the selection and choose Flip Vertical and hit enter to commit the change.
Press shift+down arrow and position the layer right below the background layer so it falls like a reflection would.
Hit Control+u and pull the saturation slider all the way down.
Pull the Lightness slider all the way down.
Ok out of the hue/saturation dialog.

Doubleclick the layer to enter the Layer styles dialog and click on Gradient overlay. Select Reflected and check the reverse checkbox. Enter 90 in the angle textbox. The reflection is now strongest right below the original object as in real life.

Ok out of the Layer styles dialog and finally adjust the layer opacity down to about 6-10% and your fake reflection should look credible.

Example result:

No reflection

fake reflection only

With fake reflection

White is boring for portraits, so how can you make those nice blurry colors you see on professionally made backdrops?

First you go out and get some oil paint in whatever colors you like, blue, red, green is good to start with, blue especially. Also get a huge tube of white and the biggest softests brush you can find.

What’s that you say? Can’t paint to save your life? No worries. Go to youtube and type in “Bob Ross” Don’t worry you’r not going to learn how to paint Bob Ross landscapes. All you are looking for here is Bobs technique for painting the blue sky he always starts out with, it’s dead easy and anyone with a pair of hands will be able to pick it up allmost immidiately. All you do is first prepare the canvas by painting it with some white oil paint diluted with turpentine about 50/50 mix and cover the canvas with this first. Then grab a tiny bit of blue paint and do some criss cross strokes willy nilly at random places. Because there’s a background of the 50/50 white mix, when you do criss cross strokes the paint wil go all blurry and blend perfectly, it’s dead easy to don’t be scare to try it. I can’t paint for shit and I picked it up after doing a couple of practice strokes on some cardboard.

Once you get this down you can create all kinds of abstract studio backgrounds. The good thing about painters canvas is that it’s very thick and though and blocks light 100% so you can paint different colors on each side of a piece of canvas to get more miliage for your money, allthough it’s cheap. Get a large roll of the widest canvas you can find and go to town, there’s about 8 lenghts of backgrounds in a large roll, paint on both sides and it’s 16, plenty for anyone. Save any scraps of canvas left over, they make exelent reflectors to bounce some light around.

EDIT: Sadly, after Bobs death, his family is raping his corpse for all its worth (gotta make the most money before people forget about him, Bob was not like this, he was a generous wonderfull person), and has been getting all his episodes deleted of youtube, making it harder for people to follow this tutorial and make thier own studio backgrounds, I found a pretty good video showing Bobs technique. Just remember, the important part for getting your studio background all smooth is to prepare the canvas with the white/turpentine mixture first, otherwise it won’t blend properly.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CUs29vV0N4

If you’ve ever tried to take a nice photo of some glassware and just got horribly bad results then these techniques will make you jump with glee.

See, you can’t really light glass because either it’s transparent and the light will just shoot right through the glass and all you’ll get is some ugly reflections on the glass, or it’s translucent and you will have problems with glare, ugly specular highlights and a headache.

What you do is simple. Light up a bright background behind the glass if the glass is transparent instead of the glass itself. Since the glass is transparent, you will see the light through the glass, or rather, you will see the reflection of the light you shine on the background. In order to get edge definition just turn off all ambient light in the room. Because of light falloff (Inverse square law) and the family of angles, even though the background behind the glass is bright, the glass will see the light in the room as very dark (Can’t trust your eyes here, the room will look bright to you, but not the glass and the camera) and that darkness will be reflected in the edges of the glass giving you nice edge definition.

For lighting glass on a dark/black background, just light up the background again. Now put a black piece of cardboard a little bit larger than the glass, behind the glass. Start with the glass right up to the black cardboard, then move it away and look what happens. When the glass gets far enough away from the black cardboard, the family of angles of the bright background reflection, will hit the edges of the glass and give you a nice bright edge on the glass.

There’s so much amazing lighting knowledge in the Light Science and magic book that any serious photographer should have this book on the top of their wish-list.

The only problem is ExpoDisc’s are bloody expensive.

You can make a home made version that works almost as well, the real deal will be slightly better but hey, this is free.

Just grab a coffe filter, place yourself where your subject will be, put the coffe filter in front of the lense and snap a shot. Now use this shot as the custom white balance for your camera. You can use a UV filter if you have one laying around and cut the coffe filter so it fits inside and use that to. The coffe filters you use should be the white type of course.

It’s amazing how well this works, much better than a gray card. The reason it works so much better, is that you are now using incident light to white balance and not reflected light like with a gray card. If your scene has for example colored wall, grass etc.. that light will reflect back on the gray card and tint your card so the white balance will not be spot on.

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.

The Zone System has 2 parts, one is for the exposure in the camera, the other is for development of the image in the darkroom. In the digital world we only need to concern ourselves with the camera part. This makes learning the Zone System much less complex.

First we need to know what happens when we adjust for correct exposure in our camera.

Point your camera at a subject, adjust the exposure so the meter is in the middle of the scale. What your camera has done now, is make the subject 18% gray. Make sure you understand this, as this is the basis for using the Zone System.

Here comes the hard part, memorizing the 11 Zones. Realy, once you have them filed away in that brain of yours, you’r home free, so lets have a look at them.

• 0 Pure black
• I Near black, with slight tonality but no texture
• II Textured black; the darkest part of the image in which slight detail is recorded
• III Average dark materials and low values showing adequate texture
• IV Average dark foliage, dark stone, or landscape shadows
• V Middle gray: clear north sky; dark skin, average weathered wood
• VI Average Caucasian skin; light stone; shadows on snow in sunlit landscapes
• VII Very light skin; shadows in snow with acute side lighting
• VIII Lightest tone with texture: textured snow
• IX Slight tone without texture; glaring snow
• X Pure white: light sources and specular reflections

So now you’r probably thinking “What the hell is this and how is this usefull?”

Remember what happened when you exposed on something and adjusted the exposure so the meter was in the middle?

Yep, you made that subject 18% gray, and that just happens to be – you guessed it… Zone 5.

Is a bell ringing right now? No? Ok, lets see how we can use this knowledge.

You are taking a picture of the sky with fluffly clouds. You expose for the clouds as those are the most important part as you envision this scene.

So now your fluffy clouds are put into zone 5, and we don’t want gray clouds, just like we don’t want no yellow snow.

Now we make a decision, we want those clouds to be bright, but we want to see the texture in them, what zone is that?

Sounds like a Zone 8 to me. Right now we are at zone 5, so we over expose by 3 stops and take the photo and those clouds are just bang on the money.

Another example:

You are taking a photo of a nice treeline. You expose for the treeline putting it into zone 5. We don’t want gray trees. We know there’s shadows in there under the branches and we want to see them, what zone might that be?

Zone 4 sounds good or 3 if you wanted those shadows to be a bit more gloomy.

Using zone 3, we now have to underexpose by 3 stops since we used them as the achor when adjusting exposure, and that puts the shadows right where we wanted them.

See how you can now look at any scene and decide where you want to place things to get the mood you want?

It takes a while to learn all the zone in the zone system, but once you do you will find a new freedom from whatever your camera manufacturer has decided is best for you.

One last thing. It’s best to put your cameras metering mode into the most narrow mode, that’s useually “Partial mode” or Spor metering mode. Every camera calls this something different so check your manual for the mode that puts the most weight into the middle of the scene.

It’s so obvious you will smack yourself, ready?…

Shoot long exposures, 10-30 seconds
Dial your flash f/stop way down, like 1/32 1/64

Now just walk around and fire your flash at the angles you need. Carry your umbrella, flags and gobos with you are just plan the shot and leave the flash modifiers at the proper places so you can quickly pick them up and put them in front of the flash.

Want to do a setup that needs 5-10 flashes? You got it

All you need to do is plan the scene and lighting setup first, then it’s just some experimentation and seeing how many times you need to fire your flash to get the exposure up to where everything is lit properly. Using this technique also allows you to fill any area so that everything in a scene is lit, allowing you to compress a scene to where every shadow has detail.

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?