Product Photography – First Attempt (Passport 8500 X50)
[Note: This is an old post from about one year or so I, for some reason, never published and just noticed it. I think is worth a post, so here it is.]
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!