Saturday, August 7, 2010

First try at Product Photography

I decided to experiment with product photography. Product photography can be challenging because it is hard to get colors perfect when photographing indoors using a tungsten bulb. Every color around can also reflect a colored light onto the subject further affecting the image. Lighting has to be perfected as well. Everything about product photography is making someone want what you photograph. It must look perfect.

I built a cheap light tent or light box to create these image. A light tent is designed to be a miniature studio. I used this resource to build it.

This is an image of a miniature vase in my house. 
This is an image of a stuffed anime character.
This is an image of a baseball player figurine.

For each of these images I had a light on the right side that was much too strong and created a shadow on the left side. I need two equal lights set up next time. I used Photoshop to correct for the tungsten lighting to remove the yellow coloring. I used the auto setting for tungsten and manually set the white balance.. I also chose to auto contrast tone the image. The image of the vase I saturated a little bit to make it more like the real world counterpart, possibly too much. 

Next time I have a few things I need to do differently. The first thing is taking more time to set up better lighting. The second thing is to use a tripod to make sure my images a perfectly crisp. The third thing is manually setting the aperture to be smaller. This will give me the largest depth of field possible so everything is in focus. Some of the images not posted here had issues with the whole object not being in focus. The final thing I need to do is make sure the area is perfectly clean. No dust anywhere and clean the object.

A Ming vase can be well-designed and well-made and is beautiful for that reason alone.  I don't think this can be true for photography.  Unless there is something a little incomplete and a little strange, it will simply look like a copy of something pretty.  We won't take an interest in it.  ~John Loengard, "Pictures Under Discussion"

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