I continuously amazed with products shown on magazine advertisement, and very much interested on how those appealing shots of – in most of the cases – very simple products have been made. Whilst large products like cars will definitely require expensive extra-powered lightings, I started to pay my attention to small products like stationaries, jewelries, small electronic devices, and other stuffs at similar size.
Exploring available resources on the net I found that photography for small products needs specific lighting equipment, which I found even harder to find than larger-powered studio lighting, at least in the country I live. Of course I can order from Adorama or BHP, but enormous extra cots for shipment and import duty have forced me to immediately wipe it as a possible option. As I thought small products would not need high powered-ligth, I decided to start with normal house-hold tungsten spot-light, keeping in mind that I would have to be careful with white balance setting.
The only thing I decided to buy was a light shed, a small tent made of diffused fabric material to soften and evenly distribut lights. I got Tronic – a Chinese product – shipped from a local online store Toko CamZone for about $35 which include one white and one black non reflecting backgrounds. The beauty of this stuff was that the 50cm width, 50cm depth, and 70cm height box could be easily wrapped down and slipped into a supplied small pouch.
For lighting I took out my existing light stands. I got an air-cushioned Excell and a very simple FoYu, so far I understand both are Chinese made. On top of each I attached a lamp fitting adaptor, allowing thread of house-hold bulbs to sit and powered. One got a 100 watts Philips spot light, and the other got a smaller 60 watts spot light with the same brand. So, here I got my simple setup of product photography studio, with the light tent sitting on a coffee table and two lights which is quite variable. Don’t get me wrong though. Variable means height adjustably through the lightstand’s column adjuster, position by moving the whole light setup, and power. Yes, damn right, I can set the power of the light, by moving the whole set back and forward.
Camera in use was Canon EOS 5D. I noted that its auto white balance setting worked perfectly so I did not worried about tungsten light coming from the bulbs. However, to be on the safe side I shot RAW, so even if the camera failed to pick the right white balance setting, I still could work around it in post processing. I found that shots taken with auto white balance tended to be better than the ones I took with tungsten white balance setting. I followed the same rule of thumb in studio photography told by a number of professional photographers in their article, set moderate ISO at somewhere between 400-800. To ensure steadiness, the camera was attached onto a flexible Manfrotto 190X-ProB with attached mini ballhead 484RC2 – I missed my pan-head though. Lens in use was manual focusing Carl Zeis Planar T* 50mm f/1.4.
My first product victim was a bottle of perfume I took from my spouse’s dressing. I spent about a couple of hours to play around with positioning of both lights to see different effect. I started to get a feel on how lights affect the object from its position outside the tent. However I believe it character of the object would be another issue to consider, for example, solid stuffs would behave differently compared to transparent glass bottle which I was using in my experiment. I wanted to explore more, but the plastic atapter holding the bulb started to get overheated and spreaded burnt-out smell.
hebat euy!!
pinjem dong tendanya…