Equipment Inventory for Product Photography

Video Transcript

"Let's have a tour of the basic stuff that I have assembled in order to pull together this photo session today. We've got a light stand. You can use whatever you can. Any pole that goes, that's tall. Often your home lamps are tall enough that you can use just a lamp pole, and on this lamp pole I have a regular household style bulb, incandescent bulb in a relatively inexpensive holder. You can use any kind of holder. In fact you can get those hand clamp units at a hardware store that has this basic shape for about three dollars. It works just as well as this unit here. I've got another light stand here. This will be coming in handy later when we start using things like this which I'll explain in a minute, and then I've got a background stand. This actually can go up a lot higher, but because I want to do a photograph where my instrument, the particular product that we're going to shoot is going to be hanging from this unit here, I've kept it low. This is just something to put a backdrop on. Obviously this is not the kind of a backdrop that we want for a product shot. We want a product shot. A product shot basically is a shot of the product with nothing else distracting it. So we want to have a neutral background. One way or another we want to have a background that doesn't interfere with the eyes' interest and focus on the subject matter. So this is just a stand in which to hang the instrument. I could have hung it from the ceiling. We could do it any other way, or you can lay it down or you can use all kinds of possibilities. This is just what I happen to be using, wanting to use today so that I can suspend the instrument in mid air. Another light stand with a standard little quartz, quartz desk lamp, and then some cloth. I raided the closet and grabbed some cloth. This might become a nice background. A sheet could become a nice background or could be used as a diffusion panel. I do have a real diffusion, diffusion surface. This is something that I picked up at a camera store, and it's not all that expensive but this will allow us to control the light in a very powerful way. We'll move it out the way for the time being. If you do not have access to a diffusion panel, a plain white sheet can serve the same purpose that that more expensive device can, and in any photo shoot where you're dealing with reflective metal objects plain old white cardboard is often very useful and handy and sometimes even black cardboard. What we're going to be doing is we're going to be trying to control the reflections on the object. That's what makes a good product photograph more successful than, than another product photograph where those reflections are not controlled and the eye is drawn by disturbing stuff that's going on in the shiny surfaces."