When it comes to product photography, there are more tips and tricks than one person could ever learn in their entire career. In this tutorial, I will show you a few of the ones I have learned along the way, using a minimal amount of gear and materials.

Getting Started

Because I believe there are already far too many, “Lighting your scene with Home Depot Lights” tutorials all over the web, I am going to stick with using actual strobes. Yes, this probably could be done using cheap Home Depot lights and if that’s all you have available, I encourage it. But in this tutorial, I’ll be targeting the beginning photographer who just went out and purchased his first strobes. However, you won’t find any expensive gear in this tutorial. I’ll be using relatively inexpensive gear. The complete gear list is below, some of which is optional (I will make note of that those items throughout the tutorial).

• 1 AlienBee B1600 Strobe
• 1 Photogenic StudioMax III 320 Strobe
• 1 Vagabond II Power Pack
• 1 Radiopopper JrX Transmitter, 2 Receivers
• 2 Light Stands
• 1 Tripod (with horizontal arm setting)
• 1 Canon 5D MKII with 24-105L lens
• 1 Kenko Light Meter
• Various other parts: Table, light stand clamps, flags (light modifiers), strobe grid

Our subject will be three watches. Why? Because jewelry in general is a bit tricky to shoot; the sparkly jewels and shiny metals reflect and bounce light all over the place. Plus, most people have watches or jewelry laying around, so you can join in at home.

Imitation Inspiration is the Sincerest Form of Flattery

My first recommendation is to open up a fashion or clothing magazine (or website) and find yourself an “inspirational photo.” There is absolutely nothing wrong with finding inspiration from other, successful ads, especially when you’re learning. Successfully imitating a great photo is a lot harder than you might think, but it teaches you a lot along the way. Personally, I prefer finding inspiration from printed magazines because I can rip the pages out and tape them to my work area as a reminder of the look that I’m after while I’m doing the shoot.

Environment is Everything

For this particular shot, I wanted a modern, dark, wood-grain look. I remembered seeing cheap little end-tables at Ikea about a week prior to the shoot, so I decided to take a trip back to Ikea to see what I could find. Sure enough, I found the tables again and thought they would be perfect for this assignment.

Two hours later (How anybody gets out of Ikea in a timely manor, I’ll never know!) and I had two tables. You might be thinking to yourself; “You purchased tables for a photography tutorial?!” Certainly! They were only each; that’s far less expensive than any backdrop I’ve ever purchased. And I’m always on the lookout for items that could be used to create a good environment for a product shoot and I’m sure these will be used again.

Lighting is Everything

You’ve probably heard it a thousand times, but lighting really is everything; no matter what you’re shooting. One of my favorite ways to play with light is to cut shapes into poster board and fire a strobe through it to see what kind of patterns I can get. For this particular setup, I knew I would be working in a fairly small space and I wanted to create long shadows and scatter the light a bit; which happens to look really nice on dark wood grain. I simply cut small squares, in a straight line, out of the poster board.

To test it out, I fired the Photogenic strobe, bare bulbed, through the back of the square holes. I played with both the angle of the strobe and the poster board until I was satisfied with the light and shadow areas that it created. It is very important to test each light separately without any of the other strobes firing. This was a step I wished I had learned early on instead of lighting everything up all at once and trying to adjust from there. It’s far easier to both meter and adjust each light separately before taking a final meter reading when you have everything in place.

Next up was my key light, which I setup to camera right. I used the B1600 with a beauty dish and grid, but the B1600 is complete overkill, you could easily get away with a less powerful strobe. As far as the grid goes, think of it like a spotlight, it directs the light to the subject while preventing light from spilling out. That’s actually not the reason I used it for this particular shoot, however. Contrary to what you might think, a grid is not a harsh light even though it is more focused. A grid actually creates nice, diffused light, very much like a softbox. I have grown fond of using grids for all sorts of shoots because they’re easier to setup and take down than a softbox. You simply snap the grid to the strobe or beauty dish. Unlike a softbox, there are no frames or materials to assemble.

The Setup

Show Time

My target f-stop for this shoot was somewhere between f11 and f16. I wanted plenty of depth of field to capture both the watches and grain of the table. If you own a light meter, you can dial in your exposure a bit quicker. If you do not own a light meter, you can simply test-fire each strobe, take a look at your camera’s histogram to check for proper exposure, and repeat until you’re satisfied.

With a light meter, you set your desired f-stop and ISO and adjust your lights until those values are reached. I settled on f13 @ 100ISO and 1/50th. Shutter speed was less important since I was on a tripod and using a remote release, which eliminated the possibility of vibrations from depressing the shutter release on the camera itself. If you do not have a remote, just set the camera to timer mode to prevent vibrations from affecting your shot.

I took somewhere between 50 and 60 shots. I adjusted everything from the watches, to the key and back lights, to the poster board and gobo, until I was happy with the shot. This stuff is almost always trial and error until you find something that works as well as you want it to.

Nothing is Ever Perfect

When you’ve shot products for as long as I have, you quickly learn one simple truth: products are rarely perfect. By that I mean that products, no matter how new or fresh out of the package, almost always have defects or little “glitches” that show up in a photograph. When you’re working with small items, like jewelry, this is an even bigger problem because the product is being viewed much larger on screen than if you were viewing it sitting in your hand. When you view small products up close, with a magnifying glass, you’re going to see all kinds of defects show up.

Let’s start off by viewing the original photo, with Aperture adjustments applied. The one, major adjustment I made in Aperture was to desaturate the photo a little. This was a purely personal choice on my part, I thought the watches blended together a bit better after a slight desaturation.

Click photo for larger version to see just how “dirty” this thing was; and this was after cleaning everything as much as possible with a rag and spray cleaner!

The image above shows my Aperture adjustments. You should be able to find these settings in Lightroom or Camera RAW or whatever other software you’re using.

Obviously, this needed some work. My very first step was photo cleanup. Basically, I used a combination of the spot healing brush and clone tool to clean up specks, dust and other small imperfections. Again, this isn’t a tutorial on how to use Photoshop, so I’m assuming you know your way around it. If not, I’d recommend heading on over to Psdtuts+ as they have some excellent tutorials on using these tools.

If you click to view the large version, you can clearly see that just the spot cleanup alone was a huge improvement.

Next up was correcting issues with the products themselves. For instance, you’ll notice on the black watch there are portions of the screen that are not displaying the number readout. To correct that, I simply copied a section from one of the numbers that was showing up well, rotated it until it was aligned correctly, and then manually edited it with a combination of the clone tool and brushes from within Photoshop to get them looking just right. I also corrected funky reflections, which are sometimes quicker to take care of in post rather than trying to prevent them in the shoot itself, and fixed other small issues here and there with the watch faces. I could have gone a lot further, but again, the point was to get the product to a presentable state.

Click the photo for larger version.

Going Back a Step

In the end, I liked having the watches a bit desaturated, but I wanted to add in some color to the fake wood grain. I added a hue/saturation adjustment layer and then used the pen tool to create paths around the watches so that I could mask them out of the hue/saturation adjustment layer. By boosting the saturation, I was able to add in some more red tones to the wood grain.

Again, click the image for a full resolution version of the final result. I think it looks great with the colors of the wood saturated like that.

That’s a Wrap

I hope I was able to provide a sort of boilerplate for getting started on shooting products. I think the most important parts of this lesson are:

• Find inspiration from ads that you admire.
• Don’t focus on the product alone, the environment that you create for your product is just as important as the product itself. I’m a big fan of finding exotic materials, leathers, woods and synthetic materials to create unique backdrops for my products.
• Lighting is everything. Yup, I’m saying it again. Don’t be afraid to spend a good chunk of your day playing around with light, it is what helps define the color, clarity and overall look of your product. Light really is king in photography, get to know it!
• Objects that look great in person rarely look the same in a photograph. Be prepared to spend a lot of time trying to fix those imperfections during the shoot or in a graphic design program in post. There’s no such thing as a flawless product… at least I’ve never seen one!

Finally, just have fun with it! As long as I’ve been doing this, I still look forward to figuring out how to fix a lighting puzzle, or what will work best for a particular product environment.

If you have any questions, leave them in the comments and I will try my best to answer them.

All photos ©Shane Parker Photography

Phototuts+

http://www.francoisberthier.com/

Fran�ois Berthier started his carrer as a a rock journalist & photographer. At the turn of his 30th, he decided to move on, and to quit his editor’s in chief job of one of the biggest rock magazine in france to return to his first love : Women. When he hasn�t been working on his fashion work, Fran�ois Berthier Shot celebrities like Lady Gaga

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Ferocious is a curated, quarterly publication that collects artists and writers.

Designer’s Word:

I’ve been working on all kind of experiments and this was one off them. I was inspired by the works of Dan Tobin Smith and played with some little rocks and metal materials from my dad, to make this happen. I hope you enjoy the project.

Check His Awesome Portfolio

Have you ever wondered how professional designers strike the perfect balance between text and image? Using InDesign’s powerful type tools, you will learn techniques to help you set and arrange a magazine layout.

Step 1 Setting up the Document

We’ll be using a standard A4 size document for this tutorial. Start with setting the number of pages to 8, the bleed to 2 mm so we have some space for images to overlap, the margins to 10 mm for top and bottom, the inside margin to 13 mm and the outside margin to 20 mm. The reason for these different margins is that in a spread with 2 pages a slightly larger margin on the outside of the page looks better and provides space to hold the printed version. It is also useful for the page grid in the next step.

Step 2 Creating a Grid

To set up the page grid, go to the “A-master spread” and choose Layout > Create Guides. A grid is used to keep consistency in the page layout and provides a framework for positioning content. A well-used grid is the first thing you need to give your layout a professional look. For this tutorial we’re going to use a 12 rows by 12 columns grid with 3 mm spacing. Choose Fit Guides to Margins to create a grid with a column width of 12 mm.

Why? Our page width is 210 mm, with 20 mm outside and 13 mm inside margins we have 177 mm left for 12 columns and 11 gutters. 12 columns of 12 mm plus 11 gutters of 3 mm is 177 mm.

Step 3 Placing a Background

When creating a magazine layout, you’ll want to keep a good balance between the white space, images and text. A good technique is to use an image with a lot of ‘empty’ space, space around the subject has the same function as white space. I’m using a photograph called, Summertime Sunshine by Stewart, it has a nice blurry background that we can place our text on.

Go to page 2–3 and place your photograph in the bleed space so that the entire spread is covered. Move the photograph in the frame so that the subject is within the margin of the first page and the top of the cocktail is at the edge of a grid row.

Step 4 Creating Body Text

Make a text frame that is placed at the same vertical and horizontal position as the cocktail on the other page, here in the third row, fifth column of the grid. This creates a imaginary line that connects the image with the text. I’ve used the title of the photograph, ‘Summertime Sunshine’ as the heading and filled the rest of the frame with the “Fill with placeholder text” function of InDesign.

Step 5 Setting up a Baseline Grid

To make our text look good we need to set up a baseline grid. Go to the Preferences > Grids and set an Increment Every to 8 pt. In this tutorial we’ll be using a text size of 12 pts and a leading of 16 pts. A baseline grid of 8 pts,which is half the leading, provides flexibility because we can also use it for smaller text sizes.

Step 6 Changing the Basic Paragraph Style

Go tot the paragraph styles palette and change the style of the Basic Paragraph. I’ve used FF Meta Book Roman with a size of 12 pt and a leading of 16 pt. You can also leave the leading at the auto setting because our baseline grid will make sure all the text is nicely aligned.

Step 7 Alignment

Go to Indents and Spacing and set the Alignment to Left Justify. On the web, good looking justified text is almost impossible to achieve, but InDesign makes it very easy to do. Also, change the Align to Grid setting to All Lines, and add 16 pts of space after a paragraph. This is not necessary and you can also use First Line Indent for separating the paragraphs.

Step 8 Hyphenation

Hyphenation is very important for justified text. It breaks up long words at the end of a column so that the column has a straight edge instead of containing a large amount of gaps. The default hyphenation settings in InDesign need some adjusting to improve the look of our body text. I’m changing the settings to use hyphenation only for words with at least 6 letters, and after the first and before the last 3 letters. The hyphen limit sets how many lines in a row can have a hyphen on the end. I think 3 is way too many and a maximum of 1 looks much better. Further, you should disable the checkboxes for Capitalized Words and Last Word.

Step 9 Justification

By default, the justification settings are a bit to loose. Set the word spacing to a minimum of 85% and the maximum to 105%. This way the words don’t have large or small gaps between them. For letter spacing, set the minimum to -2% and the maximum to 2%. This improves the justification a lot. You can experiment with glyph scaling as well if needed.

Step 10 Text Color

I’m using white as the color for the text because of the dark background. Choose what looks best but keep the text readable.

Step 11 Text Columns

Open the Text Frame Options with right click on the text frame and change the columns to a number of 2 with a 3 mm gutter. This way the line length is reduced and the readability increases.

Step 12 Heading

For the heading, we want to use a larger text size of 42 pts and a negative tracking value of -50 to decrease the spacing between the letters. Headlines can often benefit from tracking adjustment.

Step 13 Span Columns

A new function in InDesign CS5 is the possibility for a paragraph to span across columns. We’re going to use that here to make the heading span across both the columns of the text frame. Set the Paragraph Layout to Span Columns and Span to All.

Step 14 Heading Adjustments

Because of the tracking adjustment, the letters “r” and “t” are touching each other now. This is something you want to avoid in general. To solve this I’ve set the kerning to 75 between the letters which creates enough space to separate them.

Step 15 Optical Margin Alignment

The last thing you want to do is a small setting in InDesign’s Story palette: Optical Margin Alignment. This pushes the hyphens, quotation marks and wide characters such as the W and A outside the text frame. This increases the look of the edges. Click on the text frame, enable Optical Margin Alignment and set the value to your the size of the body text.

Conclusion

You have now created a simple, but well balanced page with good typography and use of white space. You have the basics set up for a consistent magazine layout.

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