Product Photography at Home

If you are like me and cannot afford thousands of pounds for top-notch studio lights and hundreds of pounds for light tents and accessories, do not worry! Get up, put the kettle on, sit back and breathe. In this, my first tutorial, I will show you how it is possible to get images like the ones below with items that you will most likely have lying around the house.











The items you will need are as follows:

3x Sheets of plain white paper
1x Roll of masking tape
Any silver reflecting surface (Tin foil or as seen in the photos, a cheese grater)
1x Desk lamp
1x Tripod
1x Camera (any camera will do. Make sure flash is off)
1x Product to photograph (In my case it was the Tetris game cartridge for the Nintendo GameBoy)




So, to be 100% honest with you, the hardest part of the whole thing is finding what you need. It took me 10 minutes. Yeah, so that pretty much sums up the difficulty of the project! I set up my "mini studio" in the kitchen as thats where I had the most room.

The first thing you need to do is stick 2 pieces of paper together with masking tape. The best way I found that will give you the most room to play with is if you stick the longer edges together as follows:





The next thing you will need to do is place the paper down so the masking tape is on the underneath of the paper. Place the paper lengthways away from you, then lift up the edge furthest away from you to the height of roughly half the size of the paper. Stick this to any surface you can and push the bottom of the paper away from you to create a curve in the paper. This curve is known as an "infinity curve" secure the bottom of the paper so it doesnt slip (I masking taped the paper to the worktop to secure it)





Now you are pretty much ready to go. Just add the desk lamp to the side of your choice and place the product of your choice onto the paper and voila. You're away!









If one side of your product is dark, just use the extra sheet of paper left over from earlier or the silver from either the cheese grater or tin foil to reflect the light from the lamp back onto the product. The most crucial thing here is to make sure the camera is on a tripod because you are more than likely going to be using shutter speeds that are well beyond handheld speeds.










I hope this is of some form of help for you all. I know its by no means professional but even if youre bored at somepoint and fancy trying something new go for it. It doesnt take long to set up and the results you can have from it can be quite interesting. You can also try mixing things up by having a black background and have something really white as your subject creating an image with strong contrasts. I don't know. I let your imagination run wild and let you decide on what you want to do.
Thank you for taking the time out to have a look and I would absolutely love to see some of the images you've taken yourself! Feedback would be appreciated and as I mentioned earlier its my first tutorial so go easy on me ;)

If you have any questions at all please do not hesitate to send me an email at andrewcockerillphotography@gmail.com

Thank you :)



Andrew.

Location:Blaenau Ffestiniog,United Kingdom

Catrin, Megan and Ffion Shoot

En Route From Focus on Imaging

What a day!! I've surprisingly learnt more than I thought I would today. On watching a few of the workshops and demonstrations that were going constantly all day there were a few that really stuck in my head. The main one being On One, the Photoshop plugin that allows you to do so many things that I have tried and failed to do. For example adding your own depth of field. It sounds easy enough but there is only so much you can do with limited knowledge of photoshop, before you start hitting walls, such as halo's around the subject you're trying to make stand out. So when I get back I will definitely 100% be looking into getting their software. All I was on the look out for today was flash triggers, shoot-through umbrella and a stand adapter to attach the shoot-through umbrella to the flash stand. But I know for a fact, even though the prices weren't that bad, I can get them cheaper online.

Thursday I will be recording my first video tutorial. It will be about my basic workflow using Adobe Lightroom 3 and it will be covering everything from first import the photographs to a final edited image. I will also do a written tutorial for the exact same image going into a little bit more detail.

If you have any questions about anything on Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom please do not hesitate to get in touch with me at:

andrewcockerillphotography@gmail.com

Thank you and happy snapping!!

Andrew.

Location:Birmingham, England.