A Still Life Project

A Still Life Project

by William Lulow

I was asked by a friend, to make some images of her collection, or a part of it at least, of specialty handbags she used to sell through some high-end outlets like Bergdorf’s, Henri Bendel and others. These were very unusual items that did very well at retail many years ago. She wanted to make kind of a mural of them as a remembrance of the kinds of products she used to make and sell. She had in mind to make a large enough blowup of the images to fill a wall in her new apartment. 

The job entailed first shooting each handbag and then putting all the images together in one, which would then be enlarged to the size and printed on the substrate she wanted.  We decided on a print that would be 52″ long by 42″ wide to fill the space she had and would be printed on a glossy surface.

Naturally, each image had to be as clean, clear and as sharp as it could be, so I set up a light table to keep all backgrounds white and used a soft light bank to get as much detail as I could in each bag. In most cases my exposures were f/20 @ 1/125th of a second, using ISO 200 or 400. (These days, as I have mentioned in previous blog articles, the sensors available in modern DSLR and mirrorless cameras are way superior to anything a seasoned pro like me could have obtained even with large, sheet film. Remember that even though I often shot 4×5″ or 8×10″ film, it was still rated at only 100ASA or ISO. This meant that we often had to use very powerful studio strobes). So, the small bump up in ISO settings enabled the use of smaller apertures and hence greater depth-of-field and sharpness. You can easily see the level of clarity obtained.  Here’s are some examples of the individual pictures:

And here is an idea of what the final mural print will look like:

As I mentioned, the final mural will be 52″x42″ and will take up most of a large wall in this woman’s house. And, it is only fifteen bags out of a collection of hundreds, but it will serve as a nice remembrance of what she used to do when she was younger. 

This project image was assembled in Adobe InDesign, saved as a JPEG in Photoshop and sized up for reproduction on a mural sized printer. Some of the darker bags had to be lightened and some retouching needed to be done to bring out more detail on the clasps. Other than that, this is what the wall-sized picture will look like. 

The bags were shot on a small light table to keep the background clean and white. The camera was a Canon r7, that has a 32.5MP sensor. The setup in my apartment/studio looked like this:

It is a very simple, straightforward setup that often proves effective for small objects like these handbags. I normally use another soft box for the light below the shooting surface, but it wasn’t necessary for these shots. So, the two raw flash heads aimed at each other sufficed to light up the table enough. Later though, I had to add another light on a stand to light up the top of the plexiglass sweep for the bags that were a bit bigger. As you can see from the samples above, lighting was optimal.

On occasion, when I was shooting for large catalogs,  I had to use larger plexiglass backgrounds, sometimes eight feet long to produce images like these:

These images required the use of a spotlight on a boom, aimed down at the background AND a softbox on a boom aimed at the tops of the glasses. Then, to produce the light on the glasses themselves, I had two more softboxes on either side of my view camera to produce the horizontal highlights that make the glasses look so nice. So, for this shot, we needed a much larger plexiglass background. Four lights were used to make this image. 

If you operate a commercial photography enterprise, as I have done most of my adult life, you need to be able to photograph subjects and objects that come to your studio. Sometimes, solutions to particular lighting problems can be solved easily and sometimes they call for some creativity. These kinds of shots are the ones that often test the resourcefulness of a commercial shooter.