Product shoot - the Good & the Bad

We had the opportunity to create a few product images for Hearth Distribution, located in Longview, Washington. Hearth Distribution is a local company that specializes in patio and outdoor appliances that are fueled by propane or natural gas. It is some really neat stuff they have in stock. The images are going to be used for both web and print so I knew we where going to have to be sure to capture very clean and well lit pictures in order to accommodate the demands of various publication formats. The good part about a product shoot is once you have the location setup, the lighting dialed in and the camera angles figured out, the rest is like a production line. Bring in the piece. Dust off. And click. Done. Next! But nothing is as it seems.

Now for the bad. In our pre-shoot conversations with our client, it was explained by Hearth Dist. that they would take the finished images, cut them out of our backdrop and “place” them into various backyard backdrops. Bully for us. We setup a nice and clean white paper background. No fuss, no muss. Now flash back to the shoot day. As we finish shooting the first piece, John (Hearth Dist employee who helped with product setup. He knows this stuff like the back of his hand! You can never have too much help I say) begins adding glass pieces into the top of the product we had just shot. I ask “what are you doing that for?” John looks up with a “what do you think I am doing” look and says – “you are going to take a picture with this lit. Right?” Uh oh. Now I have taken pictures of fires before. You know, kids around a campfire with the smores. Candle light at the dinner table. But those have an overall composition of dark and warm. For a product, I knew I would have to capture the warmth and color of the flame but also still bring in enough light to illuminate the piece. Huh. Well, let’s try the original light setup – two AB800 with soft box, one on each side of the piece, almost in a straight horizontal line with the piece. Front illumination is from a Canon speed light at camera right. Backdrop is lit by a speed light. Sometimes you stumble into a winning shot when you don’t try so hard. This was not one of those times. No go with the original setup. It was just too bright. The flame is not visible because the AB’s wash it out and the white backdrop isn’t doing any favorers. OK. Let’s regroup here. Throw up a black backdrop to allow the flame to show up. (I always have a black cloth with me. You just never know when you will need a backdrop/ground cover/changing room) Next we turned off the AB’s and the backlight. Now it was just a matter of finding the shutter to aperture ratio for the right look. I kept the Speed light at camera right but now it was going to be the main. I also always keep reflectors with me so I placed those on each side of the pieces to fill in the sides. After one or two tries (ok, maybe more like 4-6, but who’s counting) I got what I was looking for. Whew. Now that we had our game plan mapped out, it was back to knocking out the rest of the pieces. We just switched from the original “no flame “setup and then the “flame” one light, black background setup for each piece.

 

 I guess the moral of this story is always error on the side of over preparation. You just never know what may come up, no matter how extensive the pre consult meeting may have been. After we completed the shoot and were heading back to Vancouver, Patti and I didn’t even really talk about the unexpected challenges. I think we are used to that. But we both agreed that it is the unknown that makes doing this so fun and rewarding.