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Cigar Rolling Montage

admin — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 22:34:48 +0000

This is a quick demo montage that I shot for myself as a test for a lighting technique. This was shot at night using only artificial light. I wanted a really gritty feel to go with the texture of the hands and the tobacco so I raked a single softbox from behind the subject for maximum detail. This was shot with a 60mm micro nikkor lens, and processed in photoshop with a film emulator that is pretty damn accurate and organic looking. A little sepia tone adds to the mix for a successful image. The trick with this set of images is that I knew what the finished result would look like before I set the light or picked up the camera, there was really no improvisation in post production. I knew what I was going for in terms of tone and lighting, and I knew that it would be a high structure black and white triptych that would be sepia toned and tell a story of cigar production in a timeless way. Idea-plan-shoot-process, that is commercial photography.

Product Shot: Guild Nightbird

admin — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 00:23:28 +0000

I bought this guitar new in 1988, and every few years I photograph it. It is a reference for me, a litmus test of lighting and patience, and this shot was a really tough piece of camera work. I set the guitar up on a wooden block on top of some oiled black formica for a background and spent the next couple of hours trying to light it. The thing that must be kept in mind is that you aren’t so much seeing the top of the guitar, you are seeing the reflection of the light on my studio ceiling in Costa Rica. A couple of reflectors complete the lighting setup, and after that a dreamy photoshop effect was added to accentuate the highlights. Depth of field is a serious problem with a shot like this, and nothing that I could do would give me the whole guitar in focus in one shot. When I manage to buy a tilt shift lens in the future, I will photograph it again.

Product Photography at Night

admin — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 01:23:56 +0000

Click photo to enlarge

I recently had the opportunity to assist the great Parisian product photographer Peter Lippmann while he was on a shoot here in Costa Rica. Peter was contracted to take some interesting product photos of shoes, but in an entirely different way. He chose to photograph the shoes in trees lit by strobe power at night. Assisting Peter is the sports equivalent of being a caddy for Tiger Woods, you shut up and observe, soaking in every detail of his technique and photographic mastery while assisting in the creation of something amazing. It was an experience that I will not soon forget. Peter was great to work for, a real pleasure – simultaneously funny and laser beam focused. I look forward to spending a day in his studio in Paris someday and learning more from him.

Anyone with an interest in great product photography should have a look at his portfolio here: http://www.peterlippmann.com/

The above photograph illustrates a very simplified version of his technique. I shot it during the dinner of a wedding using strobes and reflectors. It was outside at night so the background is naturally black, perfect for the almost Japanese simplicity of the photo. I used a system of post processing that through the deduction of what I learned from Peter I assume is his method. The look is lightpainted, and I was trying to emulate the effect of a flashlight painting the surfaces of the flowers during a long exposure. Actual lightpainting has a chiaroscuro effect due to the irregularities in the distance between flashlight and product, and the greatly saturated color of a direct light source. I look forward to more experimentation of this technique as I believe that it can create a breathtaking effect for interior photographs and landscapes.

High Key Product Shooting

admin — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:45:18 +0000

The Price of Clean Water

This is a simple, and clean product shot that I used to illustrate the price of clean water in Costa Rica. I was publishing a rather controversial local magazine, and the hot topic of the month was sewage treatment. This is a difficult concept to properly illustrate without being nasty, so I chose this approach instead. I used a lab beaker, a crisp 5000 colony bill, and distilled water for the subject. The shot was backlit using a plexiglass shooting table, with just an overhead reflector for fill light. I wanted to keep this shot very simple and clean to drive home the point, so the background is a pure white that was lightly dickied in Photoshop. Keeping the money in place was some surf wax and a metal wire, both invisible to the camera.

Macro Product Photography

admin — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 19:04:26 +0000

Photographing shiny objects is hard, and working with small sets amplifies the difficulty. When working with reflective items like this watch, what you see is not so much the object, but more what is reflected in the surfaces. This means that all of the lighting on the set must be flawless, and the surrounding area must be clutter free or else you wind up with a reflection of a coffee cup or a camera hood in your photograph. For this image, I used a plexiglass “tent” over the watch for the clean highlights and gradients, a grey card (that can be seen in the reflection at 6:00) and a black card with a hole in the center for the camera. The cards are absolutely necessary, as the negative reflections give the product its shape. For sure there is a lot of Photoshop dickery in this image, the watch was removed from its background and placed on this black montage for a cleaner, more dynamic photograph, but besides that, the image was very clean out of the camera. Good lighting is everything with products, especially luxury items.

Focus was a major issue in this shot, and macro is always an immense challenge for depth of field. I used a micro Nikkor at F22 and shot in RAW.

This shot took a couple of painstaking hours to stage. I constructed an armature to hold the watch in place as it was suspended from the top of the light tent by fine monofilament. The lighting system was basically custom made specifically for this shot, all reflectors hand made, and all light modifiers as well.

I love this sort of work although I do not live in a market where I can ever shoot products for a living. If given the choice, this is the kind of thing that I would shoot, and food of course.