More About Shooting Still Life

More About Shooting Still Life

by William Lulow

A couple of posts ago, I talked about doing product shots. Here is a series of shots I actually did a few years ago for my daughter’s business HAPPYCHAINSNJ which she used for her online presentations.  She was making and selling neck chains to hold our Covid-19 masks or even reading glasses. They were 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 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, where I was located at the time. 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. You can even purchase a portable light table for doing shots like this which is much less cumbersome. 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. It creates a perfectly shadow-less lighting because the white plexiglass diffuses all the light from the bottom and the softbox diffuses it from the top.  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.

Here is another still life setup I did more recently. Most products look best if lit from the top and then filled in as necessary with additional lights or reflector cards. One reason is that light from above can give an object a bit more definition:

This is what the final shot was. It was not an image used in an advertisement, but just one to document the box and its contents:

Some other product shots lit from the top:

In this shot, you can tell by the highlights on the shoes, where the main light was, but can you tell where some of the accent lights were placed?  This was an image used in PR materials for Timberland. Here is yet another that I did just to experiment:

Look at what happens when this pepper is lit from the top. I sprayed it with a few water droplets and just let the bottom of it go into shadow. Highlights always attract the eye first because they are the lightest part of the image.

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.