The time had come. I’d been trying to justify keeping my X100S and X100T for some time but, in reality, since T had arrived, S had been spending increasingly lengthy spells in the cupboard. So, with a heavy heart, I decided to sell. The obvious route was on eBay, so I cleaned the camera up and took a couple of snaps before preparing my listing.
If you wanna capture quality product photos on the cheap, this short little DIY tutorial is going to be a great resource. In it, you see how an $8 IKEA table turns into a full-fledged product photo booth with just a few modifications and some creative foam board placement.
"It's not the camera, it's the photographer." We (and probably you) hear this particular phrase ad nauseam, but once in a while we run across a set of photos that say the same thing without having to utter a word. These gorgeous watch photos definitely qualify.
In this article I will show you the basics of how to do dark field and bright field lighting and a quick way to convert any softbox into a striplight using office supplies.
As a product photographer, I've always had a problem with finding what to use as a background. Even more so when I need to go to my client to shoot their products.
Before, I was limited to shooting on a black granite tile. Then I added some do-it-yourself wood planks into my props collection, but carrying the wood planks was a big problem, as they were too heavy and I could only limit myself to about 2 wood planks per shoot.
Back in 2014, the foldable pop-up lightbox called the Foldio2 got over $500,000 of funding through Kickstarter to make product photos easier to shoot.
Now the company behind that lightbox, ORANGEMUNKIE, is back with a new product: the Foldio360. It's a smart turntable that's designed to bring 360-degree photography to the masses.
As my startup gear brand Eupidere grows, we face more and more photographic challenges in shooting thrifty product photos. Recently, I had just minutes to come up with an image that is a) eye catching, and b) Christmas related. There are lots of Christmas decorations around right now and the little guy above, wearing striped pajamas, is one of them. We decided to put him into a winter scenery and wish everyone Merry Christmas.
Polish photographer Rafał Krasa recently launched Eupidere, a new brand of high-end leather camera straps. He wanted some product photos with a seamless white background but didn't have the proper studio setup, so he decided to go with what he did have: his bathtub.
Here's a 5-minute video in which photographer Jon Legge shows how you can put together a tabletop studio for well-lit product photos. It'll cost you just 10 to 15 minutes and about £25 (~$40) in materials.
The developers behind the popular Android camera app Camera51 have just announced a new app for helping people shoot the photos they need. This time the startup has targeted the online seller community with Product Camera, which lets you easily shoot product photos by automatically masking out the background behind objects.
There are already a good number of portable lighting studios on the market, but WhiteBison’s SOOC Studio strives to be the best full-featured option. The kit includes a foldable carrying case that transforms into a durable 18x16x12-inch setup with built-in 6,000K LED strips and an easy-to-clean plastic infinity curve.
Indian photographer Kunal Daswani created this short and sweet beginner's tutorial on how you can easily shoot a product photo using natural window light and a few sheets of white printer paper.
Here’s a fun and very easy way to do professional product photography light painting using your iPhone, or any other phone or tablet for that matter. The bigger the screen the better the results, but a standard phone screen will absolutely do the job.
This tutorial uses the light painting technique. Rather than the typical light painting technique where the light is used as the subject to draw out words or simple pictures; this technique uses light painting to light, highlight, and backlight the your subject. This will give you studio quality professional product photos worthy of any usage.
London-based interdisciplinary photographer Sean Tucker has created a helpful three-part video tutorial that teaches the basics of shooting larger products in a studio in front of a white background.
Remember Foldio? Introduced a little over a year ago today, it's an ultra-portable, foldable light box that gave smartphone photographers the ability to capture much more professional looking product shots. And if you want to know just how popular it as, keep in mind the Foldio Kickstarter raised over $170,000 when its goal was only $10K.
Well, today Foldio comes back with a vengeance by introducing the Foldio2: a bigger, brighter version of the first Foldio that is well on its way to smashing that $170K funding bar they set with the first campaign.
Product photography -- even when done with cheap gear like this awesome tutorial using an iPhone, an IKEA lamp and some flashlights -- usually involves multiple light sources. But there is a way around that, as Laya Gerlock over on DIY Photography demonstrates in this awesome tutorial titled "How to Shoot a Perfect Watch with Nothing but an iPad."
Inspired by Alex Koloskov's popular iPhone vs. Hasselblad whisky glass video, photographer Tilo Gockel decided to give cheap gear professional product photography a try of his own -- and he knocked it out of the park.
Using just an old iPhone 4s, an IKEA lamp, two LED flashlights, and a few Translumfoil cards (you can use parchment), he captured the photograph you see above.
We introduced you to the Light Blaster when it first came out in July of last year. A neat light modifier, it allowed you to use a lens and flash to project all sorts of patterns, slides and other non-digital backgrounds (or foregrounds) into your images.
The creative possibilities are pretty vast, but if you want to see what happens when a professional studio photographer gets his hands on it and starts experimenting, Alex Koloskov of Photigy is more than happy to oblige.
A few days ago we shared a handy tutorial on how to properly light and capture a professional product shot of bottle, complete with a few neat 'tricks' that professional product photographers use to get the right look.
Well, if you were craving more tips and tricks like that, then this video by Tony Roslund is the perfect followup.
Have you ever wondered how those beautiful beer bottle ads in magazines are shot? Product photography is one of the more complicated genres out there, packed full of neat 'tricks of the trade' and lighting techniques. And if you wanna learn a few of them, this beer bottle product photo tutorial is a great place to start.
The guys over at HouseholdHacker have come up with and shared a cheap product photography trick that's incredibly simple but yields awesome results. And all you need to take advantage of it is some sort of reflective surface (they used a glossy black trashcan...), a computer monitor, and a smartphone camera!
When it comes to product photography, the smallest changes in lighting and setup can completely alter the final image, for better or worse. This applies doubly to objects like perfume bottles where you have both transparent and reflective surfaces to deal with.
Here to help with a rather simple fix for making sure photographing these products stays as hassle-free and gorgeous as possible is photographer Andrew Boey, who gives us a rundown on how to make use of a simple piece of 'hybrid' gear to get "clinique" quality product shots.
Last week we shared a video that got both incredibly popular and controversial. It was put together by Photigy's Alex Koloskov, and showed how he created nearly-identical product shots of a glass of whisky using an iPhone and a Hasselblad.
Now he's back to answer some of the concerns that readers brought up after watching that video, specifically regarding how much post-processing went into the image and if it would be printable on the large scale.
When it comes to taking product shots of glossy items, one of the most difficult aspects is getting the correct amount of diffusion when using softboxes. When the incorrect amount of diffusion is applied (or the right amount is applied incorrectly) this can lead to harsh reflections and minimal gradients, which isn't usually the look you're trying to achieve.
Okay, we know you've asked for less time-lapses and we're doing our best to kick the habit, but this one couldn't be helped, and we're pretty sure you'll forgive us. It's not your standard stunning landscape time-lapse, this one shows the remarkable attention to detail and skill that goes into taking a great photograph of a Rolex watch, and making it phenomenal.
This is just awesome: professional-looking product photography done using nothing more than a tripod, an iPad, an iPhone and your camera of choice. Given the extremely affordable nature of the process, the results are downright epic.
There are many niches in photography, but one we don't talk about often is taking product photos. Even though these types of shots don't fall under the professional umbrella -- we're not talking professional product photography, just product shots for an online store -- almost everyone at one time or another has had to sell something on eBay or (not for the faint of heart) Craigslist.
And so, we thought we'd share this short "how to" video that Jessica Marquez of Miniature Rhino put together for Etsy. It offers beginners a few basic tips that can help take your product shots (and hopefully sales) to the next level.
If you need a tabletop photo studio for nice-looking product shots, a quick build involves using a piece of …
Needing a portable light box, Instructables member HHarry came up with a ingenious …
The popular deal-a-day website Woot made this fun behind-the-scenes video showing how the site’s product photographs are made.