A friend of mine has been gaining success in the pedal industry and needs some good looking photos for magazines and such, aka pedal on white.

I have limited gear, as I'm still in the first year of my photography journey, but with a little photoshop here and lightroom there I was able to create this.

Any tips would be highly appreciated.

Used my flash, Speedlite 430EX direct, and desaturated the knobs and such.

Not a "product photography" expert, but some quick reactions based on my other shooting:

1. Careful with your focus and DOF. In a shot like this, I'd like to see at least all the text labels sharply focused, but they're not. It's too small an image to be sure, but from this first look I'd say that even the "tap" and "bypass" are not quite sharp. And the top text is definitely unfocused, yet not OOF enough to qualify as creative use of DOF.

2. Given that you were at f/16, I'd guess aperture is not the culprit, but instead I'd more likely conclude that either simple focusing error or motion blur due to handholding at the 1/40 shutter speed are the reasons why the focus is not sharp and perfect. But the ISO 1600 says you were stretching the limits just to get that 1/40. So get more light... a lot more light. Make sure that you can use ISO 100 or ISO 200 so you get the best colors and dynamic range your camera can give you. Gotta take that tripod out of the closet. Don't own one? Get one.

3. Lots of noise, too. Disturbing and distracting when not used as a creative tool. Once you get yourself down to a low ISO, which is going to require at least 4 stops more light (if not 5...), and you use a tripod, both the noise and the AF errors should go away. Every little letter and dot should be in focus if that's the kind of image you're going for.

4. If you're shooting an image where DOF is being used to direct the eye towards something, then really open up wide and make sure that only what you want is in-focus, and the rest goes quickly out of focus. I realize one can't always spend the money, but the EXIF shows a max aperture of f/4.5 so I'd guess you're using the kit lens. If you can, get a good 60mm or 100mm macro lens (or something in those ranges) for this kind of shot. You'll get closer, get more detail, and f/2.8 will give you about 1.5 stops of light... then you only have to get another 2.5 to 3 stops from more/better lighting. Plus you'll get better DOF control and flexibility.

Hope this helps.

That helps me quite a bit actually. I'll attempt this afternoon keeping your pointers in mind.

I do have a 50mm f/1.8, would I be better off using it for this scenario?

Composition-wise, the view and perspective seems a bit off. You have the bottom and left sides aligned straight with the frame edges, but the top and right at slight angles, giving an odd mix of perspective and orthogonal views. I'd recommend choosing one of:

-> use a wider angle lens closer to the lower left corner at a lower angle with the box rotated a bit counterclockwise to get obvious large perspective distortion, or

-> use a longer focal length lens to get all four corners fairly square with the frame edges (while still showing the left/lower sides as in your current picture). You can also apply perspective corrections in postprocessing.

Check other ads in the magazines where your pictures will go to see which style (exaggerated perspective or straight-edged orthogonal) is typically used.

Kronick wrote:
I do have a 50mm f/1.8, would I be better off using it for this scenario?

Michael has already mentioned the focal length implications, so I'll stick to aperture. Having f/1.8 available will let you do some cool selective-focus work using DOF control... definitely try it out and practice on it.

Still, having a large aperture doesn't mean you can always use it! For some shots, you are going to want the whole thing in focus (even the knobs, which are currently waaaay OOF), and f/1.8 won't do it on any lens. So sometimes you'll need f/11 to f/16. And that means you have a lighting issue: just to get down from your current ISO 1600 to ISO 100 will require 16x more light (4 stops). So you can use a tripod at 1/2 second exposures, or you can add a lot more light. But to get a good product shot, you have got to get that ISO down.

For product shots, I'd even use a tripod for the f/1.8 shots. Get a nice cheap cable release, too. Every little bit of blur you eliminate is a good thing.

These tips are really helping out. I'm definitely looking to get the whole thing in focus. Once I've got results I'm happy with in that department... I'll go to attempting some cool DOF shots.

here's a second attempt using a different pedal.

Definitely better. Lower noise, better DOF control. Still got a ways to go. Are you on a tripod now? If not, get one... 1/40 is just not going to be "production-quality" sharp when hand-held. Plus, you could move to ISO 100 and 1/10 shutter speed to get even better color rendition. Also, move the lens to manual focus and focus very, very carefully. Check your results on your computer without moving the camera (again, an advantage only a tripod can give you), then make small adjustments.

You really shouldn't be having this much trouble getting sharp focus. Use the DOFmaster's Online Depth-of-Field Calculator to check on the details, but what I see is that your XTi at 22mm and f/16 should give you 4.4 inches of DOF when shooting from 12 inches away. That oughta be more than enough, so there's something funny going on with the focusing here.

As far as composition, I'd suggest you do one shot that's not rotated sideways, so you only see the top of the pedal tilted away from you, but the base goes straight left-to-right. This shot is to minimize distortion and make everything on the pedal easier to read. Then you can do a real 3/4 shot to show two sides and the top separately.

This is really helping me out. I truly appreciate all of this advice. It's truely amazing how many ways there are to take the exact same photo.

Here's one more I took before reading your most recent notes.

c&c gladly welcomed on these last two.

You have some strange shadows happening with longer shadows on some and shorter on others. And in different direction.

I am not sure if you are using a lightbox but a lightbox would really help. You likely already know this but - light is softess (long transitions on edges of shadows) when the light is close and large. A lighbox takes light and diffuses it to make it bigger and closer and then reflects it so that there is very little shadow. You can buy a lightbox at the camera store as a kit for about $150. This would greatly improve the shadows.

2nd one seems distorted by the angle and the lens.

These images are so reduced that I can't really see anything.

1. Could you please post the two separately, at least 800-900 pixels in the long dimension each? And also, would you please include a 100% crop of one of them... something like a 600x600 square cut out from the face of the pedal, where there's a lot of color edges and text so we can see the fine detail without resizing?

2. Can you describe your setup? Tripod or not? Since you're using the 50/1.8 at 1/20 shutter speeds, I assume that you're using a tripod but you've never confirmed that. What kind of lights, positioned where? Easiest if you can just take a picture of your setup with a P&S or your mobile phone, then describe the pieces.

3. Are you doing any post-processing on these? If anything at all, please let us know. Not because any of it is a good thing or a bad thing, but just so we can try to make more directed and useful comments.

I still see the focus as being very soft in these, and it's not getting any better. And with a razor-sharp optic like the 50/1.8 at f/10, they should not be! So I'd like to see whether it's the capture (camera) part that's not going quite right, or whether it's the post-processing, or whether it just looks that way in the little images you're posting but not on the real ones. And as Scott has pointed out, the shadows look a little funny.

If you'd like to send me a couple of your full-size images for me to look at, I'd be happy to do that too. In addition to the conversation on this forum, not instead of it... one of the benefits of a forum is that everyone gets to share in the Q and in the A. Just PM me if you want to do that.

Wow, that's a lot of work being done in post. And I think, after seeing the "before" pictures in slightly higher resolution, that your post-processing work is really, really good. The photography does need work, though, and is making your life much harder than it needs to be.

So that everyone can share in the conversation in the process, please post here what you told me in PM about where/when/how you're taking the pictures. And please post the "before" shot of the blue pedal... it's eye-opening.

I suggest an exercise, which I think you'll find illuminating (pardon the pun). Go back out to the picnic table, set up your tripod, and lock it in place. Set your aperture so that you have sufficient depth-of-field to get everything in focus from the top of the buttons to the text on the surface, and focus very carefully to ensure that everything you want in focus, is in focus. I'd guess that you're shooting from about 18 inches away, which means f/11 will give you about 1.25 inches of DOF on that lens and body.

Part 1 of the exercise:

Now that you've got everything set up, make sure that everything is on manual so that nothing changes except what you change. Take a series of shots, changing only the shutter speed. The first should be at 1/40, your favorite shutter speed to date. Double the exposure time (i.e. increase the exposure by one stop) for each subsequent shot... 1/20, 1/10, 1/5, 1/2, 1 second, 2, 4, and so on until you're getting an almost-white exposure. My first and slightly random guess is that you'll finally stop at either 4 or 8 seconds, and that you'll get a nice, bright, cleanly-exposed image somewhere around a half-second.

(By the way, I'm not telling you this to show off... I'm making some educated guesses for my own benefit, and I'm very curious to know later how close or how far from spot-on those guesses end up being. Could be way off, I don't know.)

Part 2 of the exercise:

Try doing a little post (5 minutes or so) on two or three of the images. Especially try working on the ones that seem either perfectly exposed (as though they were taking in brightly-lit conditions), or somewhat overexposed but with no blown highlights. You should find this whole exercise to teach you a lot about getting the right exposure for what you want, with a very low cost in time and effort.

At the end, of course, you'll end up editing only one image, whichever you decide is the best. But I think you'll find that the detail you keep is vastly better, and your work much easier, if you start with the proper exposure in-camera first. In particular, I'll remind you that accurate exposure is ideal, but if you're going to be wrong, you get much lower noise and better detail if you overexpose slightly (without blowing highlights) and then turn it down rather than underexposing and pushing up the light levels in post.

Note that I'm not clear about your level of knowledge in photography, so I'm walking a fine line between reminding you (or letting you know) about some of the basics, without telling you how to add 2 + 2. Speak up if you need anything explained, or if we can skip some of the explanations and get more in-depth.

See you after the next round.

Sounds like something very worthwhile to try. Won't get another oppurtunity to re-shoot until tomorrow afternoon, but this sounds beneficial!

Just for anyone else... here was my original.

Just thought of something... if you're going to knock out the background anyway, do try to make your life easier by doing some of the work ahead of time. The more you do in capture, the less you have to do in post. Stop by a craft store like Michael's and get a big sheet of white posterboard or big piece of seamless white paper (less than $3.00, I think), and put it under the pedal as a background instead of using the bare picnic table.

It'll reflect a little light and help soften shadows, but most of all it'll save you a bunch of time and effort in post, plus it'll improve the quality of the edges.

Ill chime in if you are using the 50mm bump it to f8,on a tripod about 2-3 feet Av mode,self timer or remote..f 1.8 isnt going to give the right look imho...and no need to go any higher than f8 in this case...and keep ISO at 100 or 200

A quick brows through the internet and I found a shot similar to what you're going for. It never hurts to look around and see what others are doing.

Wow. It's amazing how some nice internet photographer can drastically help shape another's photography. Here's my most recent attempt.

For the record -- (mostly for Rodolfo) -- I used your tips, taking several exposures, slightly over-exposing each one, until I had complete white. It was a very sunny day, and I setup a little bit of shade on my picnic table.

Specs for my "chosen one"
ISO 200
F11
1/25

This is about 15 minutes in photoshop, as opposed to upwards of two hours with some of the others... It's amazing how much easier it was.

It's also amazing how much better it looks.

Now, go back and compare your very first attempt to this one... it'll give you a very nice feeling of satisfaction.

I think most of our work here is done. But moving into the very nitpicking stage of improvement, are you doing any sharpening on these? If so, what method and settings? If not, why not? Somehow I still get the feeling that they could be a little sharper, but I don't know exactly why. Could you post a 100% crop of this last one? Just cut out a 600x600 piece of this shot, without doing any resizing, and post that... maybe there's a suggestion or two that we can still make to generate additional small improvements.

But this is already a nice job... don't interpret the search for "even better" to mean it's not a good shot.

We're almost there! Funny you should bring up sharpening because I've been told that I oversharpend at times when doing people photography, yet for some reason I totally omitted sharpening to my product photography.

Here's the 600x600 crop. Any recommendations for sharpening? Typically I'll use a combination of either High Pass or Unsharp Mask..



And the white one -- which originally troubled me oh so much. Now it behaves quite nicely with the proper exposure.

That 100% crop of the orange pedal (actually pixel-for-pixel what your camera captured) was really useful. What I think is that we've got DOF issues, because both you and I have not been thinking through it properly.

The in-focus depth-of-field is measured along a plane precisely parallel to the sensor. In theory, no real news there... but the pedal is tilted, so the 1" or 2" DOF numbers we've been throwing around as being equal to the thickness of the whole pedal are simply not true. From the camera's (i.e. sensor's) point of view, there's more depth to the subject than we'd originally thought of.

I tried copying that 100% crop into Photoshop and sharpening it, and I just don't get results that please me. For screen display, I use 0.6 pixels as a ratio in Unsharp Mask, and I got to settings like 120, 0.6, 2 where I began to see sharpening halos clearly, but still without seeing really sharp letters on that orange background. The one thing I see that's razor-sharp is the black dot right above the "a" in "ratio" (left side), and the thin square nut at the base of the dial above it.

So let's try to do something about that DOF, shall we? Selective focus is great when you're using it to artistic effect, but annoying when you're not. Hopefully this may be the last suggestion you'll need to get truly crisp, sharp shots of this pedal. Since you seem to have settled on the 50/1.8 as your lens of choice, let me suggest that you try something like f/16 and then make your your camera is at least 36 inches away from the pedal, a full 3 feet. According to the DOFmaster's Online DOF Calculator, a favorite tool when trying to figure this stuff out, that'll give you 7.6" of DOF. But more importantly, it'll give you 3.4" in front of the point of focus (closer to you), and 4.2" behind it (farther).

So our strategy is to use the right settings (50mm, f/16, 3 ft. away), and focus very carefully on the word "tremolo" in the middle of the pedal. Either use a single AF point and let the camera do it, or focus manually (a good exercise to try anyway), but make sure the focus is as sharp as you can possibly make it on that one word. The much-wider DOF should make the rest of the pedal, closer and farther, also come out in sharp focus once the camera stops down and actually takes the shot.

Since you're already there and on a tripod, you might want to experiment a little as well. Take a few shots with the exact same settings and different apertures. Even a small sample, like f/1.8, f/4, f/8, f/16, f/22, and f/32 will visually show you a lot about how DOF behaves in this kind of a setting. It'll only add a minute or two to your shooting experience, but it should be very useful.

To avoid future trips to the picnic table, you might really want to look at building your own light box. Have you seen the Strobist site? You can find a ton of lighting education there, especially lighting with only one or two cheap flashes, and also instructions on how to make your own lightbox for almost nothing.

Anything you can do with sunlight, you can learn how to do in a studio. And having everything under control will make things much easier for you. Like everything else, there's a learning curve, but it's not hard and it's worthwhile if you're going to do this kind of product shooting a lot.

I'd say you did a very fine job!