Courage Cube Loving Uplifting Gifts

I just completed a project for Rebecca Daoud founder of Courage Cube. She has suffered from chronic illness since age 29, read her story on her website at https://goo.gl/y5mDi3 (couragecube.com). Here are some of the product proofs done on white sweep. If you know a person or have a family member suffering from an illness, consider these gifts to support them.

Close ups of some of the included gifts.

Complete gift sets.

Basic catalog photos on white sweep that will be easy to knock out later for use on Amazon or mixed media advertising.

#product #photography #tampabay

Busy Month in Studio and a word about Clipping Masks

November has been a busy month for product photography. With Christmas right around the corner it's been a mixed bag of Amazon work and some specialty work. I have been doing quite a bit with clipping paths for custom ads and other uses.

 Clipping paths "knock out" the background
allowing the graphic artist to use special colors
or  images with the photo.

 Here I inserted a black background.

 Here a white background.

Here the product is left on the original white sweep.

Clipping masks do add a considerable cost to processing as I spend about an hour or two to take each image element away from its backdrop the more complex the image the more time involved.

When should you consider a clipped image? If your image will be printed on different colors like a coffee mug or a shirt; will be used in several different media like a printed ad or banner graphic with other graphic elements applied. I quote each project on an individual basis so fees do vary from image to image. Contact me through my website at www.ProdPhoto.com for more information or to request free quote.

Painted Sea Art from the collection of Jennifer Rogers.

I have run into group of marketing articles which convey the importance of quality product photos rather than attempt to rewrite the information I thought I would just re-publish the links here. The message is, without fail, use the best quality photos you can be it DYI or commissioned from a professional.
Enjoy...

The Do's and Don't of Product Photography - http://bit.ly/29PmDog
Hiring a Professional Photographer to Photograph your Products - http://bit.ly/29L3QrH
How to Drive Sales With Effective Product Photography - http://bit.ly/29Y96cr
Why Presentation and Context Are Crucial to E-Commerce Product Photos - http://bit.ly/29OT9Go

Practice, practice, and even more practice

During the off season I like to try different looks to my photography, different lighting techniques, props, equipment and so on. Here are a few latest home brew projects using different techniques. Some of these styles are not commonly used in product work unless the art director is looking to establish a particular look and feel to the product.

 Single strobe firing into several white cards.

 White cards positioned off camera right, left and above

 Small yellow gelled strobe off camera 

right with a white card off camera left

The gel creates a warm almost retro look.

2 lights, strobe with a softbox overhead and

small bare strobe from left and behind.

Silver bounces off camera right and in front.

Photographed in B&W to make the lighting very prominent.

Also experimenting with ambient light and the light created by the subject.

Long exposure and high f-stops let the products own 

light come through without over exposing the stage.

and different light modifiers...

Single strobe with a 2x6 inch snoot focusing hard light 

on the subject and eliminating any spill on the stage.

Well that's it for now until the next break in the schedule when experimentation can begin again.

The better the photos the better the video!

When we think of a TV commercial we think of video cameras, video and audio, but, many a video commercial contain still photos edited into the script. With the advent of the 4k video camera, resolution is much better than in even the recent past. Digital still cameras, however, still out perform video cameras for dynamic range and detail.
4k (4x 1080p) still is only about 2160px X 1440px or about 3mp compared to a Nikon D90, a 7 year old camera with 12mp of resolution or a newer D610 at 24mp. Even though video can't render such high quality files on TV, the higher quality the starting files the better the result after down sizing.
Here are some shots commissioned by a video house for some up coming TV spots.

Shot on white as the editor want to add color to the backgrounds in post production.

Consider a professional product photographer as another resource in your marketing tool kit.

Those Darned Shinny Surfaces!

From jewelry to water filters(?) Package and product designers love to use clean polished surfaces to give the product an up-scale appeal and it works for the most part. Hey,lets face it, we love the shinny. It's amazing how human vision can cloud the details of what we really see for what we want to perceive. 
In a store we see the chrome cap on that bottle of cologne as a shinny silver embellishment. We seem to ignore the fact that that little piece of silver is mirroring back all the objects in the area. From the sales person to all the fixtures and lighting are reflected in this little mirror. Our eyes see this visual "noise" and our brains filter it out as extra information we don't need. Examine a photograph of that bottle taken in the same place and distance, suddenly we see all the little reflections and imperfections. Our eyes are drawn to them as a moth to a bright light. When we examine a photo our full attention is focused on the item without any other distractions. Our brain shifts gears and we begin to focus on the details of the product. 
As a product photographer it's my job to photograph that shinny without any distracting reflections and still show a shinny surface without the use of software fixes which tend look faked. I have spent years learning and experimenting with the shinny enough to know that each item presents it's own set of problems and solutions. Here is an example of a shinny object that, while not being a mirror, still reflects all that is around it.

A big shinny cylinder!

Keeping some of the unevenness in the reflections helps to define the objects shape and how smooth the surface.

Having trouble with your "shinny"? I can take out the stress of the shinny. Give me a call.  

Amazon Making Product Photography Difficult for DIY

Amazon has some pretty strict rules for the primary product shots making it very difficult for many DIY photographers. The Amazon photography guide is 4 pages long and very strict about how your product shots are composed. In a nutshell, your product must be laid out in a way that is consistent with how the product is worn, applies to jewelry and apparel. Must occupy 75% of the photo, be in complete focus, be at least 1000 pixels on the long side, and be on a pure white background. The are some more rules depending on your items. Additional photos beyond the initial product shot can use models, props, and environmental locations to highlight product features.

Product on pure white.

Of late, about 1/2 my work has been shooting to Amazon specs. Not as much fun as more stylized photography but a necessary part of the business.

Having trouble meeting the requirements? Give me a call and lets discuss your project.

The Holidays Are Here!

Many of our prospective new clients are gearing up for the Holidays and I have been busily doing the salesmen routine explaining our service and what a use license is and why there are set-up fees. As often as I am explaining these aspects of the business I thought I would boil it down to the core concepts here.

First, use licenses.
Licensing can be a very complex and tortuous legal web with image use being highly restrictive as to when, how long, what geographical region use is restricted to (local or international), and even what media the images are used in (print, web, billboard, TV to name a few). This type of license are covered under a broad description of "Rights Managed". ProdPhoto.com uses the simplest licensing scheme of all, "Stock License". The essentials are that you as the client can use the images in any media, in any location, for as long as you want. No recurrent fees or charges.
Next, set-up fees.
Set-up fees vary from job to job but generally cover the cost of dressing the studio for your job. It can include consumables (wear and tear on equipment, mounting wax, strobe bulbs), special order props( pink background paper?) and special equipment rentals(lenses, strobes, mannequins)  typically used only for one project.

Here are some Holiday decorations I just finished that didn't require much in special equipment but took considerable time in set-up. Everything had to be glued down and positioned exactly.

Group shot on a glass sheet.

Everything has been glued in place.

Lifestyle

Maker

It's nice to see that the Tampa Bay area has a strong community of inventors and entrepreneurs. Local inventors produce everything from medical appliances to pet products which brings me to our new client, Smarter Reefs, who make specialized aquarium gear for exotic fish needs. His patented fish feeder is made of clear acrylic polymers making for a challenging set of photos,  pure white background hi-key photos for the up coming web site. Here are the mounting base and feed tubes final shots.

Problem: how to separate the transparent edges from the background

Solution:Use split lighting on the background and subject

The final shot

Really Cool Stuff from Kenya!

Welcome "Stuff from Kenya" to the ProdPhoto family! Stuff from Kenya imports upscale handcrafts directly from the craftsmen and craft-women. Unique leather goods, belts and handbags all one of a kind and a beautiful addition to any wardrobe. The website is not yet up  but you can visit them on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/StuffFromKenya and buy on-line through eBay.
Just started with the composition and lighting for the belts. Not complete yet but here is a sample.

Shot to Amazon's strict standards.

Close up detail of the deft hand work
securing each bead to the belt.

Imported Jewelry and Imaging for Amazon

With the explosion of jewelry vendors vying for Amazon's attention Amazon.com has had to tighten up what is considered the primary product image rules for acceptable use. Hence the 20 page long Jewelry Style Guide. While Amazon has always had these guidelines in place, certification staff has really been towing the line and images that may have squeaked by in the past won't cut it anymore.
White means white period. Not RGB 254,254,254 but 255,255,255, and sharp as a tack front to back. Quite a challenge when we are working with macro distances. This means shooting at f/22 or higher and requiring gobs of quality light only possible with very powerful (and hot) continuous halogen lights or pricey studio quality strobes.  We choose strobes. The halogen lights are so hot they overpower the A/C and heat the studio to uncomfortable levels in about an hour.
Following are an example of some rejected images.

 Wrong layout, focus, and not on white.

Not on white and focus.

All of the above would be ok for Ebay, Craig's List and other auction sites, but they fall short because of some technical flaws. We noticed the colors on the failed images were a bit off which may  have caused customer satisfaction issues because the images don't actually reflect the products true colors.

Here are the approved shots the client had us do after the in-house method failed. (Please note: there is always some color shifting because of individual monitor/browser rendering.)

Following the style guide the background measures

255,255,255 and everything is in focus. Colors

are calibrated and 100% accurate.

and now for something completely different..

decals, and not just your everyday run of the mill standard flat bumper sticker types, these are 3D and look really special. The hard part is to make these look as good in a photo as they do in real-life. The task is to shoot the 4 colors on a neutral white  at several different angles to show off the raised texture unique to this product. The problem is to keep the background uniformly lit. 

Initial shot with minimal post processing. Notice the slight
color variation caused by a slight difference in the color
temperatures of the lights from left to right (cooler lamp
on the right). Something we'll fix in the finals.

The solution was to raise the decals on a glass sheet 6 inches above the background and light the subject and background separately. 2 lights for the product and 3 lights for the background. A mono-light with a 24 inch softbox from camera right to light the product and the right side of the background. A mono-light with a 2 inch snoot off camera left to provide hard shadows showing off the texture and spilling onto the left side of the background. Finally a speed light with a 12 inch softbox to smooth out any shadows on the background. 

The angles shots required a different approach. The background showed an annoying drop shadow from the samples so we placed the product directly on the white background material. This got rid of the drop shadow but required  more post processing in Photoshop.

The small shadow in this series helped bring out the 3D design.

We Love the Small Jobs

Small jobs usually afford much more creativity on the photographer's part because there is usually no creative director, art department or brand guides to follow. The budget just isn't there. These new entrepreneurs are usually a "one man band" doing all the work to launch a fledgling business. At some point the product needs to be photographed for the web, catalogs, and other advertising. These clients tend to rely on us for design and style choices unlike the more directed projects. These clients have a general idea for how the product should be presented but it falls on the photographer to bring the vision into focus. The job is to shoot the product and design a table stand graphic for use in various upscale salons.

Here the client supplied a photo of

where these displays will be used. 

The client vision was a silver toned image. We shot the product against a silk curtain leaving the folds in view  to give a slightly soft feel to a spartan design.

After a few trial product layouts, here is the final design.

The final display design.

Done in about a day, we had fun playing with the ideas and implementation. 

We would like to welcome Dixie Belle Paint to our family of clients. We have been commissioned to update their extensive catalog of products with professional true to color catalog shots on white sweep and compose a series of environmental shots showcasing the country craft quality of the product.

Primary line of  27 paints including colors like "Florida Orange" and "Flamingo"

Natural China hair brushes.

Shooting bottled product on a white sweep is not particularly difficult, but, keeping colors accurate can be a challenge. Here the black glaze is actually blue before the coating dries. Having a fully color calibrated equipment and workflow is the key to faithfully reproducing the unique colors in this or any other product line. Controlled lighting with a known color temperature, 6500°K, is only one part of the mix. A fully calibrated camera and workstation are also required.

Glazes and clear coats.

Glaze close up detail shot.

The camera is custom balanced to a standard gray card and also RGB values are calibrated to a known standard to keep the shots consistent across the entire range of hues and re-calibrated before each set change. The workstation is calibrated weekly with a colorimeter. We use only one workstation for final processing to eliminate any hardware variables that could slip into the process.

Kudzu green.

Kudzu green with neutral gray card.

The white sweeps are actually shot to light gray to stay consistent across the product line and allow the white colors to stand out more. There is more than enough separation to "knock out" the products if needed later.