Digital Commodities - First Product assignment

As the title suggests, this was my first product job, to do photos of products for Digital Commodities on a pure white background, thus my first foray into the world of product photography. Folks, this was a task and a half, im telling you. This is by no means an easy genre of photography. The job was to photograph 40 - 50 items on a pure white background. Note: not a white background, a pure white background. If you point a camera at a white sheet of paper it will look white to the naked eye, but if you put that photo against a web page that is html white (i.e. pure white) you will definitely see a difference, as I learnt. It really has some shade of grey there, and chances are it wont be an even shade of grey. Which means to get it pure white you will have to do some photoshopping. But youre gonna be photoshopping 40 - 50 items. Very time consuming, not fun. Also, depending on how you do it, in getting the background white you will be blowing out the highlights of the object and spoiling the object itself. Not to mention photographing a white object on a white background (ha!). Flash is a whole other kettle of fish, cause once there's flash there is the shadow to think about, each differently shaped object will have different shadow characteristics, and also using flash on reflective objects will obviously create a glare on the surface.

So my approach was to build a home made lightbox (didnt have one at the time). A lightbox is basically a box with white translucent walls and at least one opening through which to shoot. The idea is that, as all the walls are white, light will bounce off the walls and wrap around the intended object, thereby reducing or eliminating shadows. I basically got a frame built and used a white tablecloth to drape around the frame. I went for the flash option as I needed a lot of light to get the background as close to white as possible. I used either one or two external flash units, triggered remotely, depending on what I was shooting at time. Some items needed one light source from above, some needed two light sources coming from the sides, of course in this case both lights needed to be perfectly balanced so there is no shadow. Hence I was constantly changing my setup.For the shiny objects, I ended up lighting them from the sides, turning the reflective surfaces away from the light so there is no glare. Through trial and error I ended up managing to shoot most of them such that the background was almost pure white, and needed only minor adjustments in post to get it to pure white. Some I even managed to get perfect straight out the camera. But not before spending many hours going through many different setups and trying many different things and shooting over the same objects everytime I learned something new. It was a lot of work but I learnt a lot, and im all the better for it.

Its one thing to do your first job for a client and have done it successfully...its another to actually see your work up on their web site:) The photos on this page, this page, this page and a few on this page are mine.(Note, the border around the photo wasnt done by me).