A few dollars worth of materials and some simple techniques help you to use your digital camera to produce professional-quality product photographs suitable for Web sites, eBay auctions, and small-business catalogs and advertising.
The key component in your home-studio product photography bag of tricks is, believe it or not, a white plastic trash bag. This will be used to create a light tent around your subject to diffuse the light, creating a pleasing low-contrast lighting optimal for showing off the object.
You will need the following for your basic light-tent setup:
Figure 1. The tent structure is constructed with wooden dowel rods placed in holes drilled into boards.
The objective is to build a simple tent consisting of the white plastic bag and some poles to hold its shape. A hole is cut in the side of the tent to give your camera a view of the subject sitting inside.
The tent is shaped with poles made from the dowel rods. Cut the dowel rods to about 2 feet in length. In each of the 2X4 boards, drill two 1/4-inch holes spaced about 12 inches apart. Push the poles into the drilled holes. If the plastic trash bag has one of those colored cinch straps built in, cut it off. Open up the bag and invert it over the tent poles. The spacing between the two pairs of tent poles can be adjusted to keep the bag fully open.
Between the poles, place a platform to support the subject along with a piece of white paper to serve as the backdrop. The platform can be a piece of foam core, mat board supported by a scrap of 2X4 lumber, doubled-up corrugated cardboard, or anything else rigid enough to support the white paper backdrop and the subject.
Figure 2. A white plastic garbage bag is inverted over the tent structure and a hole in the side gives the camera a view of the subject inside.
Cut an opening in the side of the bag that gives your camera a clear view of the subject. Simply cutting a rectangular port into the side is all that is required—you can always expand the port by trimming as needed.
Figure 2 shows the basic setup with the camera in place ready to take the picture of the subject. Note how the camera, mounted on a tripod, is pointed down through the opening cut into the side of the plastic bag tent. The bag is pulled taught by the dowel tent poles.
Using a tripod is the most important thing you can do to precisely control repeatable results and insure sharp images. Aside from that, there are several aspects of shooting the picture you can use to get the best results.
Daylight in a brightly lit room works fine. Alternatively, point a lamp at the upper part of the light tent. Don't use your camera's flash. It will defeat the purpose of setting up a tent to diffuse the light.
Position the camera in front of, and above the subject, pointed at an angle down toward it, framing it so only the white floor shows around it. The subject should be placed about 1/3 of the way into the light box. The diffuse light will surround the subject and allow you to frame the picture so that the back of the light tent does not show.
To minimize camera shake that can blur the image during exposure, use your camera's timer to set a two-second delay. After you press the camera's shutter, take your hands off so the camera can become perfectly still before the exposure is made.
Figure 3. Photo of a GPS unit was shot using the basic diffusion tent setup.
The quality of the diffuse light in the light tent will optimize your chances of getting good results for a wide variety of subjects. When using this setup you may want the white background to be truly white so that any slight shading or texture in the paper is not visible. You may have to increase the exposure to make this happen. You want most of the backdrop, but none of the subject, to be slightly overexposed to wash out any distracting detail.
Most digital cameras have the ability to show the exposed image with histogram and highlight displays. These are tremendously powerful tools unavailable to film photographers—they give you very specific information about your exposure.
For the product shots using a plain white background, check the highlight display after shooting the picture. This display will cause overexposed areas to blink in the preview so you can spot them easily. Your objective is to overexpose most of the background and none of the subject.
Figure 4. Digital camera's image preview display.
Check the highlight display and adjust your camera's exposure compensation to reshoot until you get this result. The part of the background in the immediate vicinity of the bottom of the subject may not be overexposed—this unobtrusive shading will enable the subject to look like it is sitting on something. Later a technique for eliminating that shading entirely will be discussed.
In Figure 4, the arrow points to the part of the image that is blinking black and white to indicate a highlight that is overexposed. In this case, we want the white background to be overexposed to make sure it does not show in the final image.
Figure 5. A backdrop is used for taller subjects.
Figure 5 shows a variation that may be used for taller subjects. A large piece of seemless, creaseless background paper is placed on the subject platform and curved up the rear tent poles. The idea is to have a continuous backdrop that extends higher than in the basic setup so that taller subjects may be photographed without the back of the light tent being in the camera's view.
Figure 6. Blown glass vase against white background paper.
The rear part of the backdrop may be taped to the tent poles or attached with clothes pins. With the right lighting and curve to the backdrop paper, an unobtrusive continuous background tone can be achieved.
Use a large flat sheet of paper cut to fit the width of the tent. Heavy artist's paper works well. If you want a totally white background, use a pure white paper. However any other color can be used effectively in the diffused light.
The 11-inch high blown glass vase in Figure 6 was shot in the light tent fitted with a piece of heavy white paper about 12 inches wide and 24 inches long. With the back part of the paper attached with 2 clothespins to keep it in place. The vase still gets the benefit of the diffuse light in the light tent but without the distraction of the back of the plastic bag being in the line of sight.
Figure 7. Setup to fade background to black.
In some situations, such as photographing fine art pieces, a pleasing effect is created by having the background fade to black. In professional studios this is usually accomplished using either specialized seamless background paper or with careful lighting setups.
This effect can be created with a variation of the basic light tent setup. You cut a hole in the back of the tent of sufficient size so that the camera view is unobstructed through the back. In the back, you place a corrugated cardboard box on its side with the open end up against the hole you have made. The inside of the corrugated box should be painted flat black to achieve the best effect.
Figure 8. Pottery piece against gradient background.
The ideal cardboard box would be about 2-3 feet deep, as wide as the hole in the back of the light tent, and as high as the hole or slightly larger. Larger boxes can be used without trouble if the openings are covered in the areas extending beyond the edges of the light tent. The objective is to only allow light into the box that originates from within your light tent.
Use a long flat continuous subject platform that extends well into the box. The example shown in Figure 8 is a pottery work by Lori Cramer. A pastel gray-green mat board was used as the backdrop and it extended well back into the dark tunnel at the back of the setup. When the subject is adequately lit and properly exposed, the dark interior of the box will be underexposed, appearing black in the photo.
This subject illustrates one of the most challenging problems to deal with—it has a very high-gloss surface that reflects everything around it. (In this particular case, the lighting was changed a bit to allow more of the surface detail to show through the glare.)
Figure 9. Breitling watch with no cast shadows.
Examples discussed so far have had subjects sitting on the background paper and consequently usually showing at least a little bit of shadow underneath the object, and possibly some reflected light from the background paper showing on the subject.
Sometimes, as in the picture of the watch in Figure 9, you may want to eliminate shadow on the backdrop. One way to accomplish this is to place the subject on a piece of clear glass suspended above the background material. You will still need to look carefully for subject reflections in the glass but it is fairly easy, particularly with the pure white backgrounds, to shoot the image completely separated from the background.
In the case of this watch, the subject was placed on its side on the glass, an exposure was made to overexpose the white background (but not any part of the subject), and then the final image rotated 90 degrees to show it upright.
Figure 9. White pipe fittings against dark background.
Very light-toned subjects will not show well on a white background. A darker toned background can show off the light-toned subjects better. Any color paper will do as long as it does not overpower the subject.
Exposure in this case must be straight-forward unlike the adjustments made to blow out the highlights for a white background. In particular, you don't want any of the subject highlights to be overexposed so check the image preview after shooting to make sure you don't see the blinking highlight display. Reshoot with exposure compensation if necessary.
Figure 11. Waterford crystal bowl shot against black.
Glass objects often photograph best against a black background. However, care must be taken to insure that your light tent does not contribute to distracting highlights in the glass. The setup for the Waterford punch bowl in Figure 11 included a black cloth backdrop under and behind the bowl and some short pieces of black mat board on either side of the bowl to tone down the reflections of the light tent in the glass facets.
The basic techniques of diffuse lighting and controlled exposure can be extended in ways limited only by your ingenuity. Here are a few tips to consider.
If you are photographing much larger subjects than those that fit comfortably in the light tent described here, you can still accomplish the same goal of diffused light by scaling up the tent concept.
Much larger tents are easily constructed by building a framework of 1/2 inch PVC pipe fittings available from any home center. You can construct a box framework of any size you like and then cover the whole thing with diffusion material.
You can cover any size frame you can build by slitting open the large white plastic trash bags and taping them together over the frame.
Like the basic setup described earlier, the tent can be easily dismantled and stored for later use as long as you don't glue any pieces together.
Although paper and plastic are inexpensive and very effective materials to use for diffusion and backdrops, larger or more durable setups can be built using fabrics.
For diffusion, two types of white fabric work very well (and are commonly are used by professional photographers and movie makers). Either sailcloth or ripstop (parachute fabric) have excellent diffusion properties. Others such as silk are also commonly used although more expensive.
Velvet comes to mind when you think of black fabric but it is expensive. Professionals in the movie and theater business use a fabric called duvetyne or commando (depending on which coast you live on). This fabric is sturdy, opaque, efficient at absorbing light, and is much cheaper than many alternatives.
Depending on the type of subject, lighting, and background you are using, your digital camera may have a hard time figuring out what the proper color balance should be for an image. For example white or grey may come out with an unnatural color cast or the subject may appear in substantially different colors in the image compared to the way your eyes see it. Usually extreme problems of this type are rare with modern cameras but they can happen.
Fortunately most digital cameras, unlike film cameras, make it quite easy to achieve the proper coloration for images. Examine your camera's instruction manual for how to set the proper white balance for a particular situation. Most digital cameras will provide some means to do this manually which consists of something like pressing a few buttons and then exposing a white sheet of paper in the same position and lighting you'll shoot the subject. Once the white balance is set, colors will come out correctly for any objects shot under those same conditions.
Many photographs of subjects can be improved by tweaking the lighting to control reflections or change the way a subject is illuminated. Small pieces of black or white mat board can be placed strategically to reflect more light onto part of the subject or to subdue distracting reflections. For example, the GPS unit in Figure 3 was reflecting the side of the light tent off of its smooth display area. A piece of black mat board was placed off to the side so that it would be reflected, rather than the bright tent, eliminating the distracting glare on the shiny surface.
A reflector, such as a small hand mirror, can be used to direct more light to part of a subject if necessary. An effective reflector can be made of finely crumpled aluminum foil. Flatten it out and paste it onto a piece of stiff mat board. Often the dull side of the aluminum foil works best for reflecting light unobtrusively.
The techniques described here will get you as close as possible to a ready-to-use image. However, most images can still benefit from some expert post-processing in an image editor. This topic is too broad to cover here but consider becoming familiar with aspects of your image editing software that enable you to fine-tune the tonal range, contrast, and color balance of your photos—it will be well worth the trouble to learn the basic rules of thumb to get the most out of your images.
Using the techniques described here, you can create consistently good quality pictures without a great deal of expense in time or money. If you want to move up to the expert ranks of digital photography to get the best images you can, there are many factors to consider:
