Product photography can be very, very simple
Product photography is fun because its all in the details. I was always told that product photography was really difficult, the setups were really difficult, and the lighting was extensive. Perhaps if you are shooting a $50,000 job for Budweiser and that image is going to run on TV, print, and online. In staying with the overarching theme of Hacking Photography we are going to dive into a quick and dirty product photography setup, lighting, and camera settings.
Lets start backwards with the end shots first, then how they were shot:
RX Bitters Co- a cocktails best friend. 1/160 second shutter, f/5.6, ISO 500 – hand held
hand crafted bitters product photos. 1/100 second at f8, ISO 500 – hand held
RX Bitters Co and Kickstarter
As you may have noticed by reading any of this blog I have quite the affinity for hand crafted cocktails. Not the crap you get from a pre-mixed bottle; a well thought out fresh cocktail with the best of ingredients. When I saw this article on Eater SD talking about 3 local mixologists that had a Kickstarter campaign going to make their own line of hand crafted bitters I was immediately interested. RX Bitters Co was already halfway to their goal and I wanted to help.
Each of the 3 mixologists worked at different places, but each was very well known for their cocktail programs. The RX Bitters Co campaign looked good, the video was good, but their single cell-phone photo of the bitters bottles just didn’t do it any justice. I decided right then to reach out and offer to help these guys with better photos. The concept was awesome, the graphic design from Milena V. Gavala in San Diego was impeccable, they just needed some more polish to shine it up.
The hacking product photography setup
I knew that for this campaign I wanted a simple close up of the bottles on a white seamless background. This would make sure the focus was entirely on the product for the Kickstarter page. I wanted to make sure the photos popped as soon as you viewed them. Are you ready for the most excessive, expensive, difficult to replicate lighting setup you’ve ever seen in the history of product photography? Here we go.
5 sheets of printer paper taped to a crappy ikea chair, facing a sliding glass door- complete with packing peanuts scattered on the floor for a totally unrelated reason.
Are you scared or intimidated yet? Its almost comical how simple the setup was. I simply taped 5 sheets of white printer paper to a beat up ikea chair! I put it in front of a window with lots of indirect light which lit up the paper. Here are a few more to show you the distance the chair was from the door.
The chair was only a few feet from the door. This was lit with the window light only, the flashes were from an earlier studio shoot.
I shot this to show the distance from me to the bottles. You can also see our cat Rooster hanging out assisting.
Thats pretty much it! How easy was that?
I have more detailed plans to shoot the RX Bitters Co bottles in one of the mixologists bars which we will cover later. Same goes with their portraits, we’ll be using mixed lighting, flashes, modifiers, gels, and other photographic backflips in a future post. So hopefully you’ve seen that for the low low cost of tape and paper you can create a seamless backdrop as well to shoot products on. There are other ways of doing this as well but this is a super fast hack for any type of product photography pretty much anywhere.
Now that we know product photography, then what?
Reach out and help someone! I shot these photos a few days after we met, a few days after that Imbibe Magazine (my favorite cocktail and beverage magazine ever) picked up the story on RX Bitters Co and featured my image on the homepage of their blog. They use my image to sum up 5 beverage related Kickstarter campaigns. Feel free to check it out here: http://imbibemagazine.blogspot.com/2013/03/5-kickstarter-campaigns-were-keeping.html
My photo was picked up by Imbibe Magazine to illustrate the article a few days after shooting the photos.
