Three Bottles of Campari on a Seamless White Background

Nikon D300s, Nikkor AF-S 85mm f/1.8 G, f/11.0, 1/160s, ISO 200, 1x Elinchrom D-Lite-it 2, 2x  Elinchrom D-Lite-it 4, 1x Large Sheet of White Cardstock, 2x Long Narrow Strips of Black Cardstock on each side of product, 1x Sheet of Clear Glass.

Campari on Ice - another three light product photograph

Same basic lighting set-up as the photograph in the previous post.

Three Light Product Photo of Baileys' Liqueur

A (reasonably) simple three light product shot of a bottle of Baileys' Liqueur. But how to set up the lights to get this effect? Answer below the photograph of the very yummy Baileys'.

The rim highlight you see on the edge of the bottle is from two strip lights behind the subject, one on either side and about 10" out from each side.
The background light is a gridded reflector with a sheet of round plastic inside to give the smooth glow.
Finally a snoot about 3' directly above the camera, aimed at an angle down and onto the bottle to light up the label.
The bottle is standing on a small sheet of glass out of a cheap frame someone bought me for Christmas, cleaned and polished... but the edge is a little too rough for my liking.
The sheet of glass is standing on four drinking glasses.

Below you can see the subject with each of the three lights on individually so you can see what each one does and you can also see the sheet of glass and the glasses.

This took about 30 minutes to set up and then the actual shooting was all over in just a couple of minutes, then it took a few more minutes to transfer the images to my computer and about 10 minutes to process, and then another 30 minutes to break the lighting setup down again! Which just goes to show, the actual photographing is really just a small part of what photographers do! :-)

Slow Shutter Speeds with Studio Flash for Ambient Colour and Mood

By combining a slow shutter speed and studio flash I was able to get the nice warm ambient glow of the candle falling on the scene as well as the lighting effect of the studio lights. The shutter speed was a very leisurely 4.0 seconds and the Elinchrom flashes fired at the beginning of the exposure. The Elinchroms are providing light on the label of the olive oil bottle (snoot), some fill and highlights (softboxes).

At a shutter speed of 1/200 of a second the mood and warmth is completely lost:

Doesn't really work for me the way the first one does...

And lastly, a slow shutter speed shot with all the studio lights switched off:

Olympus Trip 35 Hero Shot

I haven't been able to use my Olympus Trip 35 for over a year now just simply because I cannot find anywhere in Southern Sweden to process film. If anybody knows of a good lab please let me know, I really miss shooting my Trip... but at least I can shoot pictures of my Trip!

Here is a typical camera "hero" shot of my beautiful Olympus Trip 35 complete with authentic period Olympus Pen flash attached. The flash has a few small bits missing but that's ok, the pic looks great with it on. ;-)

Tahdah!

Oooooh! Aaaah! *Spontaneous applause*

"Why thank you, thank you very much!"

Five Bottles of Wine - on Black

With studio lighting anything you imagine is possible. Best investment I ever made!

Some good advice, if you want to improve your photography then another camera, or some other lens is not going to do it. Rather invest time in learning how to light your subject better, I guarantee that will have a major impact on the quality of your photos, much more than another high priced f2.8 zoom ever will. The temptation is always to get that new specced dslr with the more megapixels and higher frame rate, or that new VR version of the same lens you already have, but unless you change the way you light you are wasting your money. Next time you have bucks to blow, go get a speedlight instead, or a nice softbox, wireless triggers, light stands, umbrellas, heck just about anything but yet another camera body. Be strong, resist GAS, you can do it! ;-)

Mmmmm, beer! - Lighting is in Layers.

I like to think of setting up lighting as adding a series of carefully thought out layers. I normally start out with a background, work out the lighting for it and then slowly add layers until I match the vision I had in my minds eye for the particular subject.

Here is a final shot of a glass of beer and the can and then I will show the various "layers" of light as I added them in my quest for this photograph:

First up, the background light shot which is a softbox aimed from behind the product:

Next, snoot only aimed at the label of the beer:

Now, snoot and a strip light from the right of camera:

Fourth up is the snoot, strip light and a large fill from camera left:

And finally, back to the final shot with all four lights firing at the same time:

Works for me!

The best part about photographing beer is consuming the product after the session is over! :-)

Snooting a Snoot is very snooty indeed!

Had to snoot my snoot today to get the shaft of light exiting the front a little more tight and controlled to highlight a label on a wine bottle. Here is the snooted snoot:

Piece of cardboard from a recent tent purchase (not a light tent, the camping kind) with a round hole cut in and a toilet paper roll cardboard tube stuck in the hole tightly. All taped on with some masking tape. Worked. No more to say.

And here is the result, well two of them really, one with a white background and one with a black background:

And the compulsory "set up" shot just to give you an idea of what was going down:

Three Light Product Photography Tutorial

Today I have a quick and simple "how to" on putting together a nice slightly low key product shot with three lights. Here is the final result and then I will go through the steps on how to build the lighting to get this photograph:

The starting point as always is the background. The first thing is that I chose a black paper background to lower the look and feel to give a little mood. But a plain black background is a little boring by itself so I added a splash of slightly blue light to provide a separation of the product (in this case my favourite German beer mug) from the black background. I used a gridded snoot with a light blue translucent plastic cup inside, yes that's right, cup.  I have learnt to make do with what I have when I don't have the thing I actually want. ;-)

Ok, so here is how it looks with just the background light:

Not quite what I wanted because the snoot, despite being gridded still gives some light spill onto the product. Had to fix that so I put a flag onto the snoot to keep the light from hitting the beer mug and then got this result:

Aha! That's much better, nice background light without spill, just what I was actually after. So on to the main light. I wanted a large light source here so I implemented my own advice to use the bounce technique to good effect and bounced my softbox off the wall to the left of the room. Worked out ok and got this result:

I was happy with that outcome, but the shadow on the right is a bit too dim in this shot so I needed a fill light which I got by shooting another softbox onto the opposite wall and with the power output turned down a little from where the main light was set. I set it up, fired off a test shot and had some direct spill from the softbox which I cured by setting up a large flag to prevent that and only have light from the wall hitting the beer mug. Now we have a nice (almost) final shot that I am happy with:

And here is the final shot again (shown at the top of this post) after a just a touch of post production in Lightroom 4:

That is about the way I envisioned it in my minds eye and through a little gradual setting up I have a result that I am happy with. For now. Next time... black perspex seamless background! :-)

Here is a setup shot so you can see where the lights were and how they were placed to achieve the look in the final pic above:

All fairly simple and set up in the lounge. A few suggestions, get lots of light stands, it's always a pain having too few for lights, backdrops, flags, etc. rather have a couple too many than have to start looking around the house trying to figure out if the broomstick would work. Second, get lots of clamps for backdrops, and whatever else you want to keep fixed to a light stand or table. I use some cheap plastic ones I purchased at the local supermarket. They look like this:

So all that remains is for you to get shooting! If you don't have studio lights then try out the same thing with your speedlights, they will give the exact same result. If you don't have enough speedlights then maybe just get a couple of cheap studio lights, they are much more powerful than the speedlights and a whole lot cheaper as well. For a small home studio Elinchrom have a nice little kit called the D-Lite RX ONE which is very affordable and cheaper than buying two Nikon or Canon portable flashes, and stands, and adapters, and softboxes, and wireless triggers... you get the idea.

Don't be afraid to experiment. Have fun!

How to Enlarge Your Lightsource for Softer Light, easily.

I did a little experiment this evening just to demonstrate how to make a really large lightsource and give much more even light on your subject than just blasting away with direct light.

I have two 65x65cm light boxes that are quite handy. So here is a pic of them set up pointing directly at a nice Dutch vase. The camera was on the tripod in front of the table.

From here it looks like that should make for some pretty good light on the vase, but as we can see in the next photo they also leave some not so great specular highlights on the vase and two distinct shadow areas behind the vase.

Not a bad photograph as such, but we can do much better than that! So, in order to increase the overall size of the light source I simply faced the lights up at the ceiling. Of course I also had to increase the power output of the lights because the light now had much further to travel and the inverse square law robs us of light very quickly when we increase the distance the light has to travel.

As you can see from the pic above the light has now been spread over a much larger area. So what has that done for our lovely Dutch vase?

Well the first thing you notice is that the ugly specular highlights have vanished and the light is much more evenly spread on the vase itself. The second thing is that the shadows behind the vase have also disappeared. Overall a much more pleasing result!

If all you have are two speedlights instead of the bigger studio lights then don't be disheartened because the exact same principle still holds true and will work just great. Simply pump up the power a bit and let 'er rip, it will have a similar wonderful softening effect on the quality of light.

Happy product photographing folks!

A (fairly) Standard Three Light Portrait

Three Elinchrom lights used. Main light camera left Elinchrom 4 bounced into a black backed umbrella from about 45° up and 45° to the subject. Fill light camera right Elinchrom 4 about 1 stop down from main shot through a transparent umbrella. Back light Elinchrom 2 right and behind subject in a medium sized softbox. Nikon D300s and Nikkor 50mm f1.8D.

All this and another light, light stands, plus a background stand, backdrop, two cameras complete with lenses, plus a tripod all fit into one large rolling case to become my highly portable studio ready to leave and shoot on location at any time. Very convenient indeed!

Putting my Light Tent and Elinchrom lights to Good Use

For the last couple of years I have been buying up beer mugs in second hand stores, and it was all started by my daughter who purchased this mug for me at a boot sale:

It turned out to be pre German unification, so it has a little age to it as well. Since then I have added to my collection and below you can find a few of them. I used my light tent with black board inside for the seamless background, an Elinchrom D-Lite-it 2 with 65x65 softbox and Nikon D300s with Nikon 40mm f/2.8 DX G AF-S attached. All manual settings for consistency from shot to shot. Post processed with DXO Optics Pro 8.

 

Another - Single Elinchrom Softbox Portrait

From the same session as the portrait below.

Single Elinchrom Softbox Portrait

More often than not one light is all that is needed.

Portrait with the Nikkor 50mm f1.8D

Have I mentioned before that the Nikkor 50mm f1.8D makes a really nice portrait lens? ;-) Hehe!

Lighting: Elinchrom D-Lite-it 2 with a snoot from above and behind the subject pointing down at the subject from the right side of the portrait. Elinchrom D-lite-it 4 with 65x65cm soft-box from above camera and very slightly left. Edited in Lightroom 4. Vignette added.

Weekend Portrait Shoot

I shot a series of portraits for a client over the weekend and decided to share this one simply because this wonderful man's face really caught my eye, some people are just great to photograph and he was a natural!

I had a load of fun and was reminded once again that I am in this because I love working with people, and seeing them happy with something as personal as their portrait just makes my day!

After the break is the "compulsory" set-up shot:

A simple three light set-up to get a nice looking portrait with some realistic depth. The whole shebang packs up into one rolling suitcase that you can spy on the table on the left. This is all really easy to cart around to clients and use on location.

(Some clever sod commented on Flickr and said: "Your post processing is amazing. You turned a middle aged Caucasian into an older African American." My answer was: "Haha! New Lightroom plugin! ;-) Just got my ever patient wife to stand in as a "guinea pig" while I fine tuned the lighting ahead of the actual shoot.")

The portrait at the top was taken with the wonderful and super cheap Nikkor 50mm f1.8D attached to a Nikon D300s.

And finally there is one of those fancy lighting diagrams that people seem to like so much:

Due credit is given at the bottom of the lighting diagram graphic. It's easy to use and looks really nice.

Another Take on Photographing a Bottle of Wine

As you know I recently posted something on shooting a bottle of wine in a light tent, to see it CLICK HERE.

Well, this time around I wanted to try something a little different than the last shoot and go for an entirely different look.
So I ditched the light tent and set up with a single Elinchrom D-Lite-it 2 with a 65x65cm light-box, and attached a strip of black card-stock to the front of it with two black clothing pegs effectively covering about 50% of the light-box straight down the middle. I also had two strips of black card-stock on either side of the bottle to subtract some light from the light-box behind the bottle of wine. There were also two light stands on the table with some white A4 sheets of paper clamped and placed to reflect some light back onto the bottle of wine. Maybe this is a little complicated, so let me just show you a picture:

The wine bottle is on top of two glasses which were a simple matter to edit out afterwards. The end result looks ok to me. :-)

And now, the same bottle of wine and same basic set-up as above, but this time I put the bottle onto a different surface. It really changes the whole look of the end result:

Portrait of Ben (with Attitude)

Elinchrom D-Lite-it 4 snooted and shot from behind and right of the subject to give a little hair light action, Elinchrom D-Lite-it 4 through a smallish softbox aimed to just skim across the subject from camera left without throwing too much light onto the background, edited in Lightroom 4.3 to grunge the portrait up a bit. I used my favourite 50mm f1.8D attached to a Nikon D300s, with all manual settings applied.

One Bottle of Wine, One Light Tent and Two Elinchrom D-lite-it 4's.

A very simple set-up to photograph the bottle of Pomerol wine shown above:

The two Elinchrom 65x65cm soft-boxes fired through the sides of the light tent make for beautifully soft light. Next time I will add a few black flags inside the light tent to subtract strips of light in some areas of the bottle to add a bit more interest. As it is I think it turned out quite well.

Now for the best part, savouring the wine! (Where did I put the cheese and crackers?)

Nikon D300s, Manual Mode, f11.0, ISO200, 1/250s, Hand held, Nikkor 40mm f/2.8G AF-S DX Micro, 80x80cm light tent, 2xElinchrom D-Lite-it 4's shot through their softboxes on either side of the tent.