Product Photography

Product and still life photography, you might think it is easy and think to yourself, "how hard can it be to take a picture of an object that isn't moving?"

The answer, taking the picture is the easy part. There is a lot of set up for each shot, such as object placement, lighting and other small ascetic details. Sometimes it might be necessary to recreate a product, or certain things like condensation so we can work under studio lights with out a mess being created.

 This shot unlike many of the other is a single shot, and not composited. However a lot of editing is done in Photoshop to gain the desired effect and to clean up some imperfections, like scratches and dirt marks.  In this shot the condensation was recreated as real condensation isn't as aesthetically pleasing and is harder to work with under hot lights as the product will slowly heat up and the condensation disappear.

Bottle shots can be difficult, as the bottle  will reflect the light and cause dark shadows. Bottle shots take time in set up, to insure the lighting is correct.  The shot to the left is a single shot, using two lights and reflectors.  Here the bottle is placed on a white shiny surface to gain a slight reflection to add some depth to the photo. Selective doge and burning techniques have been used to emphasis logos and the edges if the bottle.

The shot to the left is a three shot composite, using one shot to light the liquid and main part of the bottle. the second to light the edges of try bottle, and the third shot a snooted flash used just to light the label. The shots were then composited in Photoshop to get the final picture.

This shot of a gold watch was by far the most complex shot to pull off.

Before shooting the watch was prepared, the glass was cleaned and the time stopped by pulling out the winding pin.  The watch was suspended via two lengths of string, the camera was positioned and the watch moved into the desired position, which must remain constant for this method to work.

This photo is a composite of five images. Four of the images were used to get the whole watch face in focus, this has to be done as the shallow depth of field caused by shooting so close to a small object.  The fifth image was taken when the winding pin was pushed back in. The images were then lined up in Photoshop and merged, taking only the in focus and best parts of each image.  The watch was then cut out and a new background inserted to gain the desired effect.

Exposure - Photography 101

So you have your camera, but you want to get out of full auto, and make your pictures look spectacular. There are a few things you need to know, Composition and exposure are the main ones. In this guide I’m going to walk you through the basics of exposure. To do this we first must know three key elements which help determine your exposure, These are;

1. Shutter Speed
2. Apature
3. ISO

Getting the perfect exposure is a balancing act between these three variable.This might sound difficult but as you progress through this guide, it will become easier to understand.  I will teach you some technical terms which photographers use, fear not! These terms are used by every photographer and will make perfect sense when I explain them. Before we dive into the list above, I’d like to explain the concept of stops of light. You may have heard this term before and you have most likely heard photographers using it. A stop of light is half or double the amount of light being captured. I will explain this in context with the list above.

1. Shutter Speed.

Shutter speed is exactly what it says, it is the speed of the shutter. The shutter is a curtain that sits in front of your cameras image sensor or film.  When you press the button to take a picture, this causes the shutter to open which allows for light to hit your cameras sensor, after a short period it closes again, stopping light from hitting your sensor or film. The length of time the shutter is open is called the shutter speed. It is measured in seconds or fractions of seconds. You can have a slow shutter speed such as 30s, which allows a lot of light to hit your sensor or film, or you can have a fast shutter speed such as 1/8000th of a second which allows very little light to hit your sensor or film.

A secondary effect of shutter speed is motion blur, A slow shutter speed will have more blur in the final image and a fast shutter speed will have less. Below from left to right is a fast to slow shutter speed image.

A stop of light in terms of shutter speed, is either halving the shutter speed for half the light, e.g. 1s -> 1/2s

Or doubling the shutter speed and doubling the amount of light, e.g. 1s-> 2s

2. Aperture 

Aperture is the size of the opening at the front of the lens.  The size of the aperture is measured in ƒ-numbers or ƒ-stops, I’m not going to go into the complex maths involved in finding this number, but I will explain the basics. A wide aperture is denoted by a small number and a small aperture is donated by a large number, below is a graphical representation of different apertures.

Apature is used to control the amount of light entering the camera, wide apertures such as ƒ1.4 will allow lots of light to enter the camera, and small apertures such as ƒ16 will allow only a tiny bit of light into the camera.

A secondary effect of aperture, is what is called depth of field, this is the amount of area of your photo that is in focus. A wide aperture like ƒ1.4 will give a very shallow depth of field, with very little of the image in focus  and a large aperture such as ƒ16 will give a large depth of field with a large area of your photo in focus.

A stop of light in terms of aperture is a bit more complicated then shutter speed. Below is a list of full stop apertures starting with the smallest aperture, to the widest. Each number doubles the size of the opening as you go down the table, allowing a stop of light extra into the camera.

3. ISO

ISO is how sensitive to light your camera sensor or film is to light. The lower the ISO the less sensitive the camera is, and the higher the ISO the more sensitive to light your camera is. This is great now days with digital as we can change this at anytime to allow us to shoot with faster shutter speed, smaller apertures, both or even the opposite and lower it so we can shoot with slower shutter speeds and wider apertures. I’m sure you have all heard of film grain, this is like little specks on your image. This is normally caused by your ISO. A low such as  ISO  100 has little to no noise while as you go up to higher iso’s you will see some to a lot of noise, e.g ISO800 or ISO1600.

Smilar to shutter speed the stops of ISO are either half or double the ISO number, so ISO200 is twice as sensitive as ISO100 and will capture twice( one stop) more light, and the opposite is true.

The key to getting the correct exposure is to balance these three variables, seems daunting but you only need to use two of these at a time. Put your camera into auto, Check what ISO your camera sets itself too, now change it back to manual, set it to that ISO, Now we only have to worry about shutter speed and aperture to get that correct exposure,  we have a tool built into to our cameras to help us do this. This tool is a light meter, you may find this on the back of your camera’s LCD, a top LCD and you will always find it in your view finder.

The light meter allows us to see if the image is under or over exposed. If it is under exposed you can either slow the shutter speed down, open the aperture or a combination of each  till the meter is centred meaning the image is going to be properly exposed, if this fails, try increasing the ISO.

If the meter shows that the image will be over exposed, you can make the aperture smaller, speed up the shutter or a combination of both till the light meter is centred, if this fails similar to the under exposed we can change the ISO, but this time we must decrease the ISO.

The more you get out and shoot trying different combinations of ISO, Shutter speed and Aperture the more you will learn to create the vision you want, and knowing how to control each variable is a key skill.

Composition - Photography 101

In the last tutorial of this series we talked about exposure, missed the post check it outhere. In this tutorial we are going to cover the basics of composition. Composition is extremely important, and is another key skill that a photographer must know. In this tutorial we are going to cover composition using the rule of thirds. The simplest and one of the most effect ways of making your pictures look great is to use the rule of thirds. This involves dividing up your field of view through the view finder into a 3×3 box like below.

To get a pleasing and interesting composition we place the subject on either one of the lines vertical or horizontal,  on an intersection shown with a red dot, these are power points and will create a nice pleasing composition most of the time. Experimenting with this is great, but remember it is a rule of thumb and might not work perfectly each time. Below are a few examples of its use. This rule can be used for any type of photography and will become second nature to you in no time!