Yesterday was spent with Beth Forsyth editor at Tie The Knot Scotland magazine on what was our third jewellery product shoot at the new Peebles Media Group HQ in the Albus Building designed by JM Architects. Product photography is quite a different bag from my usual line of interiors work, but one that I really enjoy. As far as the product side of things go, these set ups are quite straight forward, but that's what the job required, and Beth's styling as ever was great. The shot above gives you the basic overall set up, our key light being the big softbox aimed slightly towards the camera, with an overall fill coming from the brolly on the left, and a kicker from the grid on the right. Th position of the key light is crucial for creating the reflections. Here's a shot from our previous efforts demonstrating the result from a more or less similar lighting set up:
You can see the full set of the previous photographs on my website here and the actual published pages on my website here. The styling was tricky, and I did encounter one or two problems with the lighting and focus along the way, I'll post another blog about how I worked round those problems once the images have been published, for now they are under wraps. Most of the work was done in camera with the mighty Canon TS-E 45 at a few degrees tilt to snap everything into focus despite shooting at f11. One point to note is heavy cases and clamps have no end of use on a shoot, as you can see getting the tripod into a position where I could hang the camera over the products meant weighing the tripod leg down, if you're compositing you really have to make sure that tripod isn't moving, or falling over for that matter.
Having the wireless tethering system here really helped getting the compositions nailed down a lot quicker, the Tether Tools Aero Tab is one of the best bits of kit I've bought in ages, turning my tripod into one complete work station, albeit a very heavy one, it's still easily moved from room to room as required. More to follow on these shots soon, and plenty updates on the website soon as well.