Product Photo: CCTV Camera

Firstly, here's the shot:



It was a bit of a larger scale setup than you normally see on this blog. Usually I'm just working with a small background roll, either lit or not lit, which is nice and simple. For this shot though, I wanted to do something a bit different.

The CCTV camera is advertised by the manufacturer as being for high security applications. It has very low light performance. That is the two main directions of the manufacturer's literature, so I wanted to make a photograph that showed these two things. I knew that I'd want it to be relatively low key, and probably a blue-ish tone (which incidentally goes with one of the colours normally used by the manufacturer in their literature) which suggests night time, and to represent the concept of high security, I figured a military look would be good. I had a camouflage net kicking about, so I decided to put it to good use for the shot.

So, as for the setup, it's almost on three planes. The first plane is the product, the second plane is the silhouetted camouflage net, and the third plane is a large reflector with a flash lighting it.



You can see the lighting on the product consists of a small flash with a striplight modifier vertically above the product, two silver reflectors lighting the front and underside of the product, and a second flash to camera left bouncing off a white reflector to give some blue fill around the lens and front of the camera. This was to give a feeling that the camera was looking into the blue night.



Here's an alternate view from the rear of the CCTV camera.



Here's a view of the camouflage net, which is suspended from a background roll holder with two clamps. In the photo it isn't lit at all. I turned the striplight flash towards it to make it visible for this shot.



And the most important part? A bit of sticky tape to keep the iris control wire for the lens nicely tucked out the way. Nothing worse than dangling wires on a product shot!