A Primus start in product photography

A new Tuesday, a new challenge: today I tried my hand at product photography. 

For those of you wondering how I got going, here's my wrap-up of the shoot: I used several different 'products' or objects in my shoot. 

It all started with me finding a decent white background. You can of course also use other colours, but I preferred to start out using white as a background. With the object put on a white small chest, I put one of our smaller softboxes right next to it and I started shooting. 

As a starting point, I used a shutterspeed of around 1/125  and an aperture of around F11. 

The great thing about trying something new is to experiment to see what works best. Not relying on old habbits, not just going by what worked before should work well now too. Experimenting is great fun as you get to know your camera and the situation(s) even better! 

So after my first shots, I moved the lightsource a bit closer and to other positions to see the effect. This helps to understand how the light falls around the object.

After a couple of more shots, I uploaded the pictures into Lightroom. It immediately struck me that the images needed a second light to fill more shadows. So in the next few shots, I used a reflector to bounce the light back on the subject and the result was much more pleasing. Next time though, I'll be using 2 softboxes instead of one in my set-up to get better results straight away.   

Post processing was done with Lightroom and Photoshop. And I bet now you're pretty curious to see some of the results: 

These first two images are in the OK range, but it bugs me that I didn't have a whiter background. 

Another cool thing in experimenting is that you don't only get to experiment in shooting cool images, but you also get to improve your Photoshop skills. For example: with the help of 'Color Range' I made the bottle in the background green.

And this last image is my top image of the day. Not bad for a first attempt at product photography. I learned a lot today and one thing is for sure: we need more room to be able to make bigger set-ups. Have fun experimenting and see you in the next blog!

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