Product photography

A friend who runs his own design and marketing company recently asked me if I’d be interested in doing a product shoot for a client - a sugar manufacturer called Plantation Reserve. He had redesigned the packaging and needed shots for the company’s relaunched web site.

I was keen to try something different and although I’d photographed guinea pigs and rotting fruit on a white background, this was a different challenge altogether.

Professional product photographers will have a studio set-up with a table, table-mounted lights, booms and a light tent. Not being in the business, I had to improvise so on the morning of the shoot, I went to a haberdashery in Lewisham to buy a couple of sheets of material, one black, one white. Perfect for doing a seamless background.

I pushed a table against my son’s cot, draped the sheet over the side of the cot and onto the table surface, which created a very credible “seamless background”.

The brief was to get several different shots, including three different bags of sugar, a metal tin, piles of sugar, close-ups of sugar granules, sugar on a wooden spoon and sugar pouring from a spoon.

Without specialist equipment, I had to improvise with the lighting too.

I originally tried lighting using off-camera flash through white umbrellas but this didn’t suit the product. Bare flash produced much sharper results. The problem was with positioning and securing them.

In the end, I put the camera on a tripod, used the 10 second timer, and moved around the table with the flash, trying different angles and distances from the subject.

I was pretty pleased with the results in the end. The pick of the bunch ended up on the Our products page on Plantation Reserve’s web site.

Other images from the shoot below:

Comments

[Jamie Product Photography]

The second to last one works really well. The ambient glow of the wooden spoon with the black back ground looks great.

[Matthew Lemon]

Thanks!