As I mentioned in the previous post, I offered my “services” up to a good friend of my significant other and did a photoshoot of her side business. She does excellent calligraphy for special events, weddings, etc. I highly recommend checking her out on Instagram and her Etsy page.
So I gathered up my gear and headed over. I brought my camera of course, the newly fashioned light box. Some Neweer lights I had got a while back for stop motion animation, my flash, remote trigger. Etc.
We set up the light box on the kitchen table and I got to it. Shot probably 5 or 10 different types of products, with several examples of each. But here was the first mistake, I didn’t think about this from a different perspective. Mainly I should have been thinking about it from HER needs. These pictures should be used to make the product look their best and encourage people to purchase. I was mostly going back to my previous product photography experience, which was partly that but mostly documentation. We would shoot stuff on a white background and just crop out everything that wasn’t the product. Mostly it was stuff made of acrylic so our biggest concern was the flashes reflection.
So while I shot all of her products in the same way, I should have thought about how they would look with just a plain white background. This would get fixed in the next photoshoot I did with her, but for this one I just edited some examples of what I wanted to do. I’ll show those later on.
The next problem I experienced would come to light when I got home and started editing. I didn’t think to check the photos on site, just went with what was on the screen and figured that was good enough. *narrator* “it wasn’t”
Even though I used my two small lights and my flash, the most overpowering light was above the kitchen table. Which as it turned out…
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @38mm - 1/10 Sec - F4.5 - ISO 100
Was SUPER yellow lighting. Something I absolutely should have caught while we were there with the products. It really affected the way I could edit them, as you can see the writing was in gold. Which means adjusting the colors was changing the gold calligraphy as well. Which is not what I wanted.
Same image, just edited
I did the best that I could, but trying to leave a transparent edge to the acrylic without messing up the color. In the end it was a mess overall and I should have just checked the images when I was doing the shoot. But some of the paper, not acrylic, signs turned out nicely I thought. And there were these neat tile coasters.
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @ 135 - 1/10 Sec - F5.6 - ISO 100
Even though the lighting is uneven, and it’s not as clearly in focus as I would like. All about learning. I tried to edit a couple of these together in a way that seemed, different at least.
Edit of several photos together
It is very distracting how the edges are all lit up unevenly.
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @122 - 1/8 Sec - F5.6 - ISO 100
Another type of sign she had were these smaller table numbers. These were also acrylic, hence why they seem so off yellow where there isn’t paint. But with this one at least the calligraphy was white, so I could do a bit more color editing. I pulled a stock photo online and threw together a quick edit as an example for what I wanted to try and do the next photoshoot. Since I had done this one so poorly my first inclination was to offer another as soon as we could.
Not my best work at all. Looks very obviously placed in digitally. And trying to get an item that you shot flat on, to appear on an angle. Is not as easy as I thought it might be.
I think I had a bit better luck with the second image I edited into a stock photo.
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @50 - 1/5 Sec - F6.3 - ISO 100
Same image edited into this stock photo
Although it still is obvious that it’s not a natural picture, I like this one a lot better. I matched the shadow from the sunlight by creating a duplicate of the sign and just made it gray scale and mirrored it onto the table. This one was pretty impressive if I do say so myself, and that was the feedback I got as well. Thankfully something was usable out of this photoshoot so not a total loss. And all the knowledge I gained from my mistakes really came in handy when we got together again for another shoot.