Product photo question

Sam

Yesterday I shot a collection of 27 military 1911 hand guns. I had done a fair amout of practice with a brown / tan leather background, and this seemed to work prety well.

The client didn't like the leather and wanted a white background.

The problem is that when I try and use the white with the dark color of the gun the camera under exposes. I put a Mcbeth color chart in a few phoros for reference, and it seems that when exposed so the color chart is not blown out the gun is way underexposed. If I just ignore the white background and the color chart and blow them out the gun looks much better.

I am thinking (no jokes here) that this is a result of the way my 300D is metering, and I should have used full manual and upped the exposure at capture.

One other thing I noticed is that if I defuse the light. The photo comes out very flat, but if I let more light strike the gun even with additional high lights the serial number and detail improve.

Any thoughts and advice would be greatly appreciated.

Sam

Shay Stephens

Studio shooting = manual mode
If the light isn't changing why shoot auto? In a studio situation, you are better off controlling everything at the time of the shoot, from WB to exposure. Leave nothing to chance.

Sam wrote:

One other thing I noticed is that if I defuse the light. The photo comes out very flat, but if I let more light strike the gun even with additional high lights the serial number and detail improve.

Here is my main problem with the way many people describe lighting. They use the term "harsh light" to describe hard light. And when you think harsh, you think bad. So everyone flocks to soft light because it is the opposite of "harsh light and therefore must be "good" light.

As you have found out, soft light has very low contrast. That can be a good thing when needed, such as when you want to hide wrinkles and flaws in a subject. But if you don't want to hide fine details, but instead bring them out, you need to use hard light. It alone has the contrast needed and the directionality needed to bring out fine details.

Many times, you need a combination of hard and soft light to get what you need done.

Now one other thing, now that I think about it, was the white background lit separately from the subject, or was the white background lit via the subjects lighting?

I ask because you get much better result by lighting the white background separately from the subject. This is especially true with large objects.

Sam

Shay Stephens wrote:

If the light isn't changing why shoot auto? In a studio situation, you are better off controlling everything at the time of the shoot, from WB to exposure. Leave nothing to chance.

Here is my main problem with the way many people describe lighting. They use the term "harsh light" to describe hard light. And when you think harsh, you think bad. So everyone flocks to soft light because it is the opposite of "harsh light and therefore must be "good" light.

As you have found out, soft light has very low contrast. That can be a good thing when needed, such as when you want to hide wrinkles and flaws in a subject. But if you don't want to hide fine details, but instead bring them out, you need to use hard light. It alone has the contrast needed and the directionality needed to bring out fine details.

Many times, you need a combination of hard and soft light to get what you need done.

Now one other thing, now that I think about it, was the white background lit separately from the subject, or was the white background lit via the subjects lighting?

I ask because you get much better result by lighting the white background separately from the subject. This is especially true with large objects.

Shay,

Thank for your response. I was shooting outside under a translucent fiberglass porch roof, and the light did vary as the sun, clouds shifted. I was using aperture priority.

The white background was lit by the main light (sun), and had no separate lighting source. The guns were on a 4" stand to provide some separation from the background and did reduce shadows substantially.

I took 4 photos of each gun, 2 left side, and 2 right side. On one shot each of the left, and right sides I tried holding a piece of cardboard 6 feet over the gun to block the direct light. The best shots are with the more direct light.

Thank you for confirming and articulating my observations with regard to lighting. Always good to know one is at least on the right track. :

During processing I noticed 2 distinct line groupings in the histogram. The one to the right I believe represents the white background, and the one on the left side represents the gun. There is a blank space between the 2 data groups.

I have moved the right slider to the left side of the right data group. This seems to provide a clean white background without and detail, but has no effect on the gun. I treat the second data group on the left pretty much like a separate histogram, and process the gun from there. This seems to be yielding good results with pretty accurate color, which is important to collectors.

I am trying to sort through 118 photos down to get 54 final processed images to send off for printing.

While I always had a great respect for GOOD wedding photographers, I have a renewed respect after trying to process what is a pretty small number compared to what you do for every wedding.

Sam