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How To Get Creative With White Balance And Product Photography

Aug 5, 2012 by Udi Tirosh Leave a Comment

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Ok, so how to add a little something to a pic by fiddling with the white balance a bit? First, I took a standard pic of my daughters sneakers. What do you mean that’s not something you usually do? Just go with the flow and stop arguing with me ok!

Standard pic of daughters sneakers:

How To Get Creative With White Balance And Product Photography

This was taken with two Speedlights to light the sneakers, a Nikon SB700 to camera left on a light stand firing into a black-backed umbrella and providing the main light from the front. There is also an sb600 with a home made gobo shooting onto the white wall behind the subject (sneakers) to provide a second soft light from behind.

The result is not bad lighting wise, but what if we wanted to add another element to this to change, and hopefully improve, the look?

So what I did was attach the incandescent filter that comes with the sb700 to the front of the sb700 that was giving me my main light. It was on a light stand shooting into a black backed umbrella from camera left a little up. (See the set-up/pull-back shot further down.)

The picture below is of the sb700 with incandescent filter attached and firing, while the sb600 is providing the light against the back wall. The cameras white balance is set to incandescent, so the sb700’s light is correctly balanced and the sb600’s light turns a lovely blue!

How To Get Creative With White Balance And Product Photography

And here is the sb600, complete with home made cut-from-cornflakes-box-covered-in-silver-duct-tape gobo. It is held on the flash with a spare modelling balloon “borrowed” from my wife who uses these things to make balloon animals at childrens parties. Yeah, I know, but it works! ;^)

How To Get Creative With White Balance And Product Photography

This combination now gives me a result that I like a little more interesting.

How To Get Creative With White Balance And Product Photography

And here is the promised set-up/pull-back shot:

How To Get Creative With White Balance And Product Photography

The orange cloth is a cheap microfibre cloth which is great for cleaning surfaces, products, camera lenses, and my glasses. Never leave home without one.

The table is a cheap fold down variety that is quite sturdy, but light weight. You can get them cheap at Netto in Scandinavia. That might be a bit far to travel for a cheap table if you live in the US or Africa (or elsewhere) so rather look out for one locally.

But… if you do decide to get one at Netto, look me up when you get to Malmö, I’ll buy coffee!

One last piece of equipment that I used in this shot was the Nikon SG-3IR, which is a special cheap plastic flippy flappy thing that attaches to the cameras flash hotshoe and covers the built-in flash to filter out any light from the flash while still letting the infrared light through to maintain communications with the remote flashes. This allows controlling rxternal strobes without influencing the light on the subject (sneakers). It looks like so:

How To Get Creative With White Balance And Product Photography

The photo of the sneakers was taken with a Nikon D90, AF-S DX Micro Nikkor 40mm f/2.8G, Aperture Priority mode, ISO200, 1/60s, f11.0, implementing Nikon’s fantastic CLS system, hand held and processed in Adobe Lightroom 4.

About The Author

Lanthus Clark is a photographer based at Arlöv, Skåne, Sweden. You can follow his work on the The Photophile. This article was first published here.

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Related posts:

Product photography is way more creative and exciting than you think Here are Five product photography tips and tricks to get those creative juices flowing Creative Sports Photography: How To Show Motion For A Creative Effect Don’t forget about the work-life balance when running your photography business

Filed Under: DIY, Tutorials

About Udi Tirosh

Udi Tirosh is an entrepreneur, photography inventor, journalist, educator, and writer based in Israel. With over 25 years of experience in the photo-video industry, Udi has built and sold several photography-related brands. Udi has a double degree in mass media communications and computer science.

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