Product Shooting On Location
by William Lulow
A couple of posts ago, I talked about doing product shots. Here is a recent series of shots I actually did for my daughter’s new business HAPPYCHAINSNJ which you can check out on Instagram or Etsy. She is making and selling neck chains to hold our Covid-19 masks or even reading glasses. They are personalized and delivered to your door.
She needed some photographs that could display a large number of chains in one picture. She was making all of her photos with her iPhone by placing them on a white board that she had in the house. She obviously needed a bit more professional setup, but couldn’t come to the studio to get it done. That would have required her to pack up all her chains, get babysitters for the kids and make a trip to my Westchester studio. So, being the dutiful father that I am, I packed up some studio items that included: two saw horses, a white plexiglass table top, a softbox and an extra light to light the table from underneath, not to mention the camera gear I needed. Here is what the setup looked like in one of the rooms of her house:
You can see the light below that creates the “light table” effect and the softbox above, that creates the soft light to illuminate the product itself. The camera is mounted on a boom arm so that it can be placed directly above the product. This is fairly rudimentary, but it can be easily transported to be set up on location. The light below the table can be moved or the direction of it changed to provide different shades of white on the surface itself. For this particular setup, I had the power of the under light about twice that of the softbox on top. The exposures were f/18 @1/100th of a second at ISO 100. Here is more of the setup:
And, here is one of the final shots:
There are many shots I do on location these days. As a matter of fact, most of my assignments call for me to set up my studio either in a company’s offices, or outdoors. Once, doing a job for a large catering firm in New York City, I had to bring all my product-lighting equipment, including one of my 4×5 view cameras, to their kitchen! Here’s one of the shots I did there:
See if you can figure out how many lights were used and where they were placed.
But, being basically a studio photographer, I still find it easier to use my studio equipment and knowledge at these various venues. It really doesn’t matter what the location is, because the principles of good lighting apply anywhere. But you have to know what they are in order to get great results wherever you may be shooting.
