Sorry this post is a day late. I lost my non-Etsy job last Wednesday about five hours after my last post so things have been a bit hectic around the Lazy Day Photo HQ. I think that we are on the verge of things settling down now, so we should be back on track to hit next Wednesday on time.

What we are going to be talking about today is ways to take the basic gear that you gathered up last week and to start shooting some great looking product shots for your Etsy store. We are going to focus on two fairly popular types of shots today: a product on a textured background and a product on a white background.

Product on Textured Background

So my shots from last weeks post were taken using my full setup: camera on a tripod with a off camera flash shooting though an umbrella on a stand. That is some cool gear to play with, but what if you took my suggestion last week and just got some work lights? It’s very, very possible to get a very similar shot. Here is my setup for the shot above:

The rock that the necklace is sitting on has been placed on a card table in my office and you are looking down from essentially right above it. To the right is my work light and to the left is a piece of white foam core. Over the work light I have attached a piece of parchment paper (regular copy paper would work as well.) What this does is diffuse the light coming out of the work light to soften it, so you just get a nice glow on the necklace. The white posterboard on the left serves to bounce back the light from the work light, which makes it so you don’t have harsh shadows and so the necklace is well lit on both sides. The reason we shoot this shot on a tripod is because even though it might look to you like there is a lot of light shining on your product, to your camera things actually look pretty dark. That means that the shutter on your camera is going to stay open quite a bit longer, so without a tripod, your shot would be blurry.

The black object you see in the lower right of the shot above is a remote trigger. This allows me to take the shot without even touching my camera, which eliminates the possibility of additional camera shake that can make your pictures blurry. You can pick these up for most DSLRs off of ebay for less than $10, but you can also just set the timer on your camera and let the camera shoot the picture itself.

Product on a White Background

Shooting a product on a white background can be pretty tricky. The goal is to get a shot of your product without any shadow with just a start white background. The hard way to do this is to put your product on a white piece of paper or foam core, shine a ton of light on it and try and eliminate the shadows. The problem with this method is that it’s almost impossible to do without at least three or four lights and even then you usually end up doing a lot of Photoshop work to get rid of the background.

This setup will make your life significantly easier. We have two work lights with the parchment paper on them shining directly onto a piece of white foam core. The foam core is actually leaning just a bit on the lights and the top is just a bit further forward than the bottom, so the necklace that is hanging down is not actually touching it. This totally eliminates the shadow that the necklace would throw if it was sitting on the foam core. The lights are also lighting the necklace, but mostly through the diffusion caused by the paper. If you wanted to get even a bit more tricky you could add a third light on the necklace itself. Straight ouf of the camera this shot was almost perfect, but I did about a minute or work in Photoshop to improve it even more. Sometime this week I’ll throw up a bonus post on that.

Tips and Hints

• Shop lights get crazy hot really, really fast. If you are using normal paper as a diffuser, be careful as they could set it on fire. The parchment paper works really well as it’s make for baking, so it can take the extra heat. I attached it to the lights using binder clips.
• If you are still getting strange shadows on a textured background, trying changing the angle of either the work light or your reflector (or both).
• Adding a vignette to your product shot on a textured background really brings the product into focus. Here is a way to do it in Photoshop, it should be possible in other programs as well.
• Do a couple of test shots to see which of the white balance settings on your camera produce the best shots. For these shots the auto setting on mine was to yellow, but incandesant looked great.

The Wrapup
As you can see from these two examples, you can get some pretty great Etsy product shots without a lot of fancy equipment of spending a lot of money. With this gear you also don’t have to rely on being able to shoot in available daylight (both these shots where taken at about 9:00 at night, so it was dark outside. They also don’t require you to make/buy and store a lightbox, which I think are often more trouble than they are worth because it takes so much light to make them work. Next week we are going to talk about advanced gear and how it can really take your shots to the next level.

As always, if you have any questions please feel free to send me an email and make sure to come back next week!

Tags: camera, cliff johnson, Etsy, gear, lazy day photo, lighting, photo studio, Photography, photos, props, tripod, Tutorial

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at 11:52 pm and is filed under Etsy, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.