Peter Belanger describes shooting product shots for Apple here
My question is, near the beginning of the video he sets up a diffuser/scrim with a white frame between his key light and the product. Can anyone identify this? The reason I am interested in a white frame is the ones I've seen have black or aluminum frames which often ends up reflecting off the product surface.
It looks as though it's just a small diameter PC frame with velcro edges to which he's attached the scrim material to it with the same. 6 dollar & 20 minute project.
The advantages of using small diameter PVC (remember this is for your studio work) is that you can create different sizes of this by just using the same type of diffusion material for color balance, and buy different lengths of PCV. I could make 4 or 5 of these of varying sizes for the cost of 1 of the store bought units. And you'd be hard pressed to tell them apart from 5' away. The point is, a tremendous amount of money can be saved by doing modifiers yourself.
Agree with 10box on what diffuser he's actually using, but to John's point there's plenty of cheaper ways to accomplish the same thing. I use stretcher bars, wood glue and Rosco 3008 with a flash head, reflector and grid.
If your trying to get a nice flat white edge in a reflection, I would use a flag to cut or block the light versus using the edge of your diffuser, if that makes sense. Then you don't need to worry about what the diffuser edge looks like. Or if its a square, I would honesty just photoshop it or get a soft box. I'm not sure having white tubes would actually help, would it? If the light is coming from behind the tube, it would be blocking the light on the product side anyways.
You can also buy Matthews open-ened frames that will fit in a grip head you can close-down the opening of with say fishing line. Hit B&H, but envision the above Gel Knife with one end open...
Another DIY solution is to hit Home Depot et al and get some white 'make your own' screen window frames and corners. They're flat white aluminium 'bars' that you cut to length and snap together using supplied white plastic corners. A nice thick very opaque diffusion material I use on occasion is Translum.
Given the profusion of Matthews grip heads in that scene, I can imagine he is using a spring-steel frame from the same company (the silk is factory installed). I have open and closed frame versions of that size. The borders are color-coded to denote material and stopping power.
For reflective objects like those Apple products, there are better modifiers with hard borders and perfectly uniform illumination: ProBox, StripLight, and StillLight. As a Profoto user, this Peter Belanger should be familiar with the price!
rico wrote:
I can imagine he is using a spring-steel frame from the same company (the silk is factory installed).
The diffusion material is almost never pre-installed, and it really never should be. The beauty of those 4x4 frames is that you can swap out the gel and have infinite combinations of diffusion. On film sets we have an average of about 30 4x4 frames on the truck, and lots of different gel rolls to skin them however we want. More often then not we are shooting a light through 2-4 of them, with the thickest diffusion closest to the lamp, and the thinnest closest to the subject.
