Studio Time

During yesterdays lecture we spent this in the studios experimenting with different lighting to get the required effect that we wanted.

So first off we was in the mod cap room, using the flash kit.
Eventually we decided a shot we wanted this was a catalogue shot. e.g. No visible shadows!

We played around a lot with this trying to decide wether or not hard light was better to use than soft light. Soft light was a lot better to use, it allowed us to smooth the shadow out so to say. There was still a shadow there however it wasn't visible to the camera.

We placed a light at a 45 degree angle and attached a white disc and a softbox to soften the light. We also placed a back light facing away from the product towards the background, this allowed us to manipulate the shadow into being in the required position. It also lit the background for us which was good as it was a slightly darker grey.

With the flash kit we set both lights to 3.5, this was so we didn't have so much of a flash that it filled the picture with white. Originally we tried it at 6.0 however this was just too powerful and made our image just look like white canvases.

Once we had done this we broke down all the equipment for the other group and we went into the studio.

The other studio was more useful for taking product photo's.

We had a small bottle of aftershave to photograph. I set up the red head light and placed it at a 45 degree angle facing toward the desk, by desk i mean stage with a translucent background.

We placed the object onto the stage, and took the lid off and everything just fell into place and we managed to get some decent shots straight off the bat, our lecturer suggested using a blonde under the desk, which no one volunteered for and he kindly got on the floor to help us out. This created a very nice picture, we then continued experimenting we used a reflector for one shot and changed the aperture allowing a shorter depth of field creating a image of the product but without the background in focus.

This lecture was very fun for me, i learn very well doing practical things - I know have some practical experience in setting up lights, which is a hell of a lot more useful than having someone stand up front and dictating how to do it, to me.

I plan to go back into the studio with a few classmates and practice setting up and taking pictures of objects.

Once I have the images I will post them onto the blog.