Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
Everyone needs to photograph products once in a while.
Whether it’s for an etsy shop, ecommerce retail, eBay, a Shopify store or just for the occasional Craigslist sale; it’s really handy to be able to do your own high quality product photography.
In this article, I will show you a super easy, low cost, product photography setup that anyone can use to create very high-end looking DIY product photography.
In his previous tutorial, Malaysian photographer Andrew Boey showed you why a white wall is the only backdrop you’ll ever need. After turning white to black, in his latest tutorial, he teaches you to get all kinds of vibrant colors from a plain white wall. You don’t need a backdrop or Photoshop, but some speedlights, light modifiers and color gels.
Guys at raw.exchange offer tons of great resources for photographers and retouchers. They are devoted and serious and put a lot of effort in their packages, and for this article, they shared with us how they built a “rusty wall” background – out of wood!
“Why would you make a DIY rusty wall” you may ask. Well, one of the very attractive packages is their Rusty Wall background textures. It features 82 hi-res background textures of a rusty way, taken from different perspectives. And although they are master retouchers, their background is a real deal. So, if you’re less into Photoshop and more into DIY and building, or just curious to see how raw.exchange background comes to life – carry on reading. The kind guys from raw.exchange shared with DIYP how to make the rusty wall background out of wood.
Do you have the habit of photographing plates? This doesn’t refer to food photography, but to the backgrounds you capture to give you more options when you get to the editing process. In this video, Jay P. Morgan shares some great advice why photographing plates is important and how they can be useful for your work. They can definitely save you sometimes and help you get the shot even when everything seems lost.
Before you raise your torches and pitchforks, this is not another post about how focal length affects your subject, or whether you should “zoom with your feet” or not. I’m sure you’ve already seen how changing focal length and/or distance changes perspective, but this video answers an important question – what can you do with this information?
Jay P. Morgan shows examples how changing your focal length and getting closer or further away from the subject affects the relationship between the foreground and the background. Knowing this helps you achieve different things in a shot, gives it different looks and meanings, or helps you avoid distracting elements.
(hit play on this movie to see what this article is about, this is not a computer generated image, it’s all done in camera – see the final product here)
As someone who deals with compositing on a daily basis, I foud myself in a restless state. And I don’t mean that restless state that all us creatives are in, I mean something that was extreme even for me. I am always struggling with backplates, so I started making a wish list of what the perfect backplate would be. What would it look like? Turns out it’s not an easy question, and it definitely does not have an easy answer. Making that backplate required a $50,000 camera and ended up as a 14 Gigabyte file. But I have finally found how I want my backplates to be. Here is the story of how I made it.
Here is a great tool to add to your lighting toolbox, controlling lights with gels. It’s not about making the light hard or soft, it’s different of control, one that allows playing with color relations. And While there is quite a bit you can do with gels in general, today I am going to focus on controlling backdrop color.
There is a way to get three looks using only two lights and a gray backdrop. If we take this concept and expand it, we can use gels to control the background. We can actually mimic quite an infinite number of backdrops. Instead of using two studio strobes like I did in the last tutorial, for this lesson I’m going to be using three speedlights. The reason I wanted to use speedlights rather than studio strobes is because I got a handful of questions about whether or not the 3 in1 headshot could be done with more basic gear. In order to lay those concerns to rest I wanted to get back to basics and use some of the least expensive gear on the market to prove that you can get some great images with very inexpensive gear.
When setting up a studio, one of the more difficult decisions that a newer studio shooter must make is which backdrop to get. More often than not, it’s which backdrops (plural) should they get?
Photographer Joe Edelman is going to make it a real easy decision for you with this very informative video. You don’t need to get a whole bunch of backdrops, especially when you’re just starting out with studio work. All you need is grey.
We might not possess the power to change the weather during a photoshoot, but we do have the power to change how the sky and surrounding environment looks with nothing more than a few tweaks to a camera’s settings.
Here to explain just how to do that is David Bergman.[Read More…]
Photographer Robert Mitchell (see bio below) came up with a clever solution for creating an almost infinite amount of backgrounds using nothing more than a wall and a bucket of paint. While painting and repainting takes some time, the results definitely justify the effort.
Every photographer that builds a studio or converts a room for use as a photo studio gives thought to backgrounds and backdrops. Seamless paper is available in a few widths and a multitude of colors but it’s not always interesting or appropriate and depending on what you’re shooting, seamless can be boring and ugly. The paper itself doesn’t cost that much and you can rig things to hold a roll without any serious investment in hardware, and for some, this is more than enough, and everything they need.
You can find out more about John on his website or follow him on Facebook and YouTube.
can change a lens mid-rappel, swap a memory card while treading water, or use a camel as a light stand.
To see more of his work please visit his studio website blurMEDIAphotography, or follow him on Twitter, 500px, Google Plus or YouTube.
JP’s photography is available for licensing at Stocksy United.
Find my work on My website or follow me on Facebook or My page
