Johan Ronsse photography

Set up a little product photography studio last night, too bad I didn’t think of making a shot of the setup. Basically it was just a dark room, 1 flash mounted on a tripod with an umbrella (firing into the umbrella (white) and back, 1 big piece of white paper.

To make the room dark – I avoided any environmental light coming in so I covered the window in the room I shot the pictures in as much as possible with tape, paper, even a Quechua 2” tent. Anything I could find really.

Here’s the results.

Things learned:

• Get the products as clean as possible before shooting (I have to keep reminding myself to do this)
• Get the background as white as possible in-camera or you will have a lot of editing work (look at your histogram to figure out what you are seeing)
• This was an off-camera flash setup with a Cactus trigger, so there was no actual studio strobe involved. The camera couldn’t focus in darkness (and I couldn’t focus manually because it was too dark( so I had no choice to turn on the room lights which in turn messed up my white balance (had camera WB set to “Flash”). Fortunately white balance is easy to fix in Lightroom (using RAW files). A proper studio light has an extra light that goes off when you fire your camera.
• Glass (non-colored) is hard to edit since it has a slightly off-white color so hard to select in Photoshop
• Black objects are harder too, the solution here is to overexpose a bit to compensate

Special FX failures:

• I tried to mist the ferns with water to make the photo a bit more special but this is not obvious at all on the picture, I guess water droplets only make sense if you are doing close-up/macro.
• I tried making ice for a beer product shot but it didn’t really work out, the ice melted before I could even get it set up. Will need to read up on “fake” ice.

Product photography challenges ahead:

• Photograph on a black background
• Photograph on a grey background (or make white grey through lighting)
• Product photography with multiple flashes
• Find some interesting prop backgrounds too (wood, metal, etc.)