JakeB17 Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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You should definitely tailor your lighting to the product, but there are some general setups which sort of work well for almost anything.
Here is one I just did for a friend's 14-24 I'm putting up on the B&S boards.
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http://www.jacobfilm.com/uploads/14-24-bts-2.jpg |
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The key here is really the white granite counter top in my kitchen. Or at least I think it is granite...I light people and things for a living, I don't build houses, so I'm not really sure, ha.
It is a solid, reflective material that not only bounces light well, but allows for a reflection to appear, so the item doesn't appear to be floating. The floating item syndrome is common when shooting on cloth, like bleached muslin, or in cheap light boxes.
Adding a sheet of glass underneath can work out even better, but this was quick and dirty.
After securing a good shooting surface the next step is lighting, which in this case I kept very simple but very soft. If you want to get really into it then get some foamcore and create both black and white cuts the size of your product that you can place right next to the object for bounce or negative fill.
The key here is lighting with a large source from high and behind, and using bounce and soft fill for the front.
The light coming from behind is a 1,200ws strobe in a 50" soft lighter, pushing through an 8x8 of 1/4 grid. The strobe is about 3-4 feet from the 8x8 1/4 grid, so it fills as much of the 8x8 as it can in my small kitchen. If I took the time to do this in my studio I would have placed the strobe another 5 feet back, because as you can see the light doesn't fully fill the 8x8 frame.
At about 1/2 power I'm getting around f/16 @ 100 iso. The beauty of this large source is that in combination with the white reflective shooting surface you hardly need any fill from the front, where your key light typically would live.
In this case I have a speed light bounced into a 40" white umbrella, and dialed way down, to almost 1/64 power. Even a 320ws strobe on minimum power was way too much here. Then out of frame on the right I have a 3ft piece of white foam core for bounce. Neither light from the front is making much of an impact, I'm letting the counter top bounce the light from the huge backlight.
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http://www.jacobfilm.com/uploads/14-24-bts-1.jpg |
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Then here is one of the finals, almost straight out of camera. I really only needed to adjust contrast and color temp a bit in LR to taste.
And then one for fun in B&W to show off the reflection.
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http://www.jacobfilm.com/uploads/14-24-bts-3.jpg |
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