Now then, let’s look at various lighting conditions and how they affect your photographs. The following photos in these examples are straight from the camera and have not been touched up whatsoever. This is raw footage, and is a solid reflection of the results you would get under similar conditions with pretty much any camera you use. In this area of the tutorial, I am going to mention aperture and shutter speeds. if you’re not sure what F-Stops are and how aperture can affect focus area, you should probably check my tutorial on Aperture and Shutter Speed for Product Shots.

Once again, please note that you should ALWAYS take your product photos with a tripod unless you are using off center flashes with reflectors and/or diffusing umbrellas, in which case you can go handheld because exposure times are so fast. These are professional flash setups, and chances are you don’t have one, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this tutorial past the first few words. With that said, let’s look at the first sample, which is a photo take with our photo lights on as well as the built-in flash:

Here’s how the setup looks while taking the photo (special thanks to my daughter who donated her playroom for 30 minutes for this tutorial):

Next up, we’ll turn off the flash and just rely on our $10 lighting rig. We’ll pump the camera’s shutter speed to a full 5 seconds and close up the aperture to F29. By closing up the aperture, the entire statue will be in focus instead of just the main focus area like it did with the flash.

The physical setup is exactly the same as before, except this time I turned off the flash:

As you can see, we’re solved the issue with our colors getting washed out by turning off the harsh effects of using a flash. The colors here a nice and brilliant, but we now have a new issue. The direct light has nothing in between the fixtures and the statue to diffuse and soften the light, so we end up with very harsh highlights and super dark shadows, which have eaten up quite a bit of our detail. If we used a statue with a lot of large, smooth and glossy features, there would have been a lot of glaring “shine” too. So, we’ve solved the color issue, but now we have to fix the harsh effects of hard light.

The next step is to get our light tent in place! The light tent is made of a super thin plastic based material that is specially made to diffuse lights for product photography. The material will diffuse and soften the light for even highlights and will help to cut down on glaring highlights and harsh shadows. The result will be a well lit piece with maximum details while still having effective lighting and rich colors.

Here you can see a couple of angles of the setup. I’ve placed the tent on the table, moved the lights a bit and placed the statue inside:

Looking at the photo, you can clearly see details, such as the etching marks in the base, that were missing in the other photos and all the highlights and shadows are much softer overall. This photo was also taken at F29 for maximum details, but I slowed the shutter speed to 8 seconds for this shot. You can clearly see that this photo is far superior to the other 2 samples and with further tweaking of lighting positions and aperture, you could darken out the background even more. As it stands, you now have a much more effective and professional product photo, and you’re well on your way to shooting magazine ads!

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