Sunday night I wanted to try a new technique but I got tired of using myself as the “guinea pig” of my photography experiments, so I decided to try product photography.  Conveniently I want to sell my radar detector, a Passport Escort 8500 X50, so that became my subject.

Product Photography - First Attempt

Picture setup explained:

I used a three flash setup (three speedlights). One strobe is to the right of the camera as fill-in flash with a blue gel firing through a white umbrella.  A second strobe is lighting the white background, also has a blue gel.  The third strobe is left of camera positioned right on top of the radar device with an CTO gel and a snoot of about 12 inches to emphasize on the product. I added a bouncer that added a bit more light to the black rippled bottom background.  I used photoshop to add extra vignette effect (the background flash already produced a slight vignette effect) and also added the effect as if the radar was on (obviously didn’t do a good job at it).

For my first attempt, I’m pretty happy with the results. What would I do different next time? Well, two things I would try to add a bit more light to the bottom part of the product.  I would also position the fill-in light in a way that doesn’t reflect on the plastic as it did on the right-upper corner.

Critiques welcome!

I suggested my friend Gilbert that he should pose for my experiment (he agreed).  Missing light stands I setup two strobes left & right of camera on top of a table and a chair.  I set one strobe at just a bit less than 1/4 of power and another one at 1/8. The strobes both had about 1/4 CTO gels.  Unfortunately the lights were way lower than the subject’s face so I didn’t get the best results but I had to work with what I had. Everyone else was well into the guitar, singing and the burned marshmallows so I didn’t think about using to human light stands.

At the end I liked the results, although I know it could be done better with some planning. The image has not been retouched except for the copyright addition. Your feedback and tips are appreciated.

This is the end result:

(FYI: The picture is being resized to fit in the browser, to see it properly you may have to click on it to open it separately)

Strobist style night portrait

<Update: 12-04-2009>

Below is a portrait of Felipe. We got the effect by accident as he wasn’t aware he was supposed to stay still after the flash went off on first curtain sync. I like this ghost effect as it gives the sensation of action in the picture as if it was alive. The flash and camera settings were the same as the one used for the portrait above.

Strobist style night portrait of Felipe

Humbly speaking, I was amazed by how the pictures turned out and very pleased by how the colors reflected on the water and the clarity of the pictures. I already have ideas of things I will do next time to get better results but that’s just part of the learning process.  For those of you thinking “how boring can photographing a drop of water must be”, let me tell you I never thought doing this would be so much fun and interesting.  We certainly can’t appreciate what happens when a drop hits a surface because of the speed at which it occurs, but once we’re able to freeze the moment we start appreciating the physics behind drops, tension, momentum, kinetic energy, sound and all those things some of us studied in college but never look at again.

For this attempt I used two strobes positioned left and right of the camera with different colored gels. Here are some of the pictures. (Note: There is no Photoshop involved here, I only use a batch process to add the copyright stamp, other than that what you see is what I got straight from the camera):

I have added link to the full size images since I noticed the quality looks pretty bad on some monitors because the images are reduced to fit in the blog.

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Last night I received a certificate from Adobe stating that I’m now an ACE (Adobe Certified Expert) in Advanced ColdFusion 8. Well great news for me but why do I mention that in my photoblog? Well considering the importance of the certificate I wanted to have an electronic copy of it. I also wanted to post it on my Tech blog as I don’t really have an assigned office so, the certificate will probably be in a drawer for sometime whithout getting seeing by anyone.

This reminded me of a post I saw once at the Strobist about photographing a historic piece of paper. I couldn’t find the post (if anyone knows the link please post it in the comments) but he explained how he gave the paper picture a 3D (more realistic) look instead of having a flat looking one. So, what a great opportunity to put that technique to test.

First the photo with on-camera flash, diffuser on, cranked down to about 1/32 and  pointing directly to the paper:

Flash on-camera

On-camera flash Zoomed in

Now the picture with off-camera flash, laying flat on the table pointing towards the side of the paper. I can’t remember the flash power but it was somewhere between 1/16 – 1/32. The faded bar is part of the certificate’ design:

Off Camera flash laying down on table

Off-camera flash Zoomed in

Now, that’s some nice paper texture! The first one looks more like a scanned image (flat) and the off-camera flash looks more real. One more example of the many advantages of using off-camera flashes.

As each member entered the room they were greet by us (me and my wife), then asked to take a sit at the hot couch.  The hot couch was surrounded by 3 flashes; each one with a different purpose. One to the left of the subject looking downwards lighting only the face by using a snoot. One behind the subject, lighting only the fireplace using two gels (orange and red) simulating that it was on. Another flash mounted on the camera (front of subject) pointing to the ceiling used for fill-in flash. Here are some if the results:

Self portrait @ Strobist DC kickoff

Dianne's portrait @ Strobist DC Kickoff

Todd's Portrait @ Strobist DC kickoff

Girls' Portrait @ Strobist DC Kickoff

The meeting went for about 3 hours.  We broke the ice by talking over Hors d’oeuvres & wine (soda for the speaker).  Then I presented on basic lighting tools, techniques & concepts. The presentation was very dynamic as members contributed to some of the topics and I was able to show most of the tools I mentioned. From there we procedded to build the snoot, which took us about 15-20 average to build using cereal boxes and/or foam sheets. Then everyone put it to the test right on the spot. Some of the results will be posted at the Strobist DC meetup group page (http://www.meetup.com/strobist/photos/). I have posted more of the hot couch pictures there as well.

I look forward for the next meeting which I’ll be scheduling soon. Thanks to all of those who attended, shared and learned with us!

If you wonder how was I able to get a model so quick. Well, that’s my beautiful wife and victim of many of my experiments.