Product Photo: Microphone

This entry is based around what is a pretty average and perhaps fairly boring product photo. A simple shot to show what the product is without being overly dramatic, while making something a little more exciting than your average eshop shot.

I've made a video to go with this, which you can view at the bottom of this entry. For a change, I decided to "bare all" and show all the shots involved in this shoot. You'll probably gain more from this exercise if you can view the video as well as this blog entry, because I'm only able to show the main stages for this image.

So starting off, I go for a two light setup. A key light and a rim light. I quickly felt the key light needed to be diffused, so opted for a shoot through brolly. This gave the following shot:



To bring the product out of the blackness, I added some small white reflectors to try and give some curvature to the handle of the microphone, and get a little extra light on some of the edges.



To further bring the product out of the blackness, I put a spot of red light (chosen to bring out the red in the microphone) on the background behind the microphone. I also softened the rim light a touch to make it a little more subtle, relying more on the background light to provide separation.



It's always wise to get a couple of different shots, so I took a vertical format image at a different angle. Same setup, so just a change around of angles. Quick and easy to do, and gives your client some choices when laying out a page for their product brochures. Also, keeping the same light means that the images you give your client have consistency, which can be good if they're using more than one in a brochure and want to maintain the same look and feel throughout.



Here's a couple of shots of the setup