This is just a unretouched photo from a project I am working on at the moment, sooner or later it will end up in a book with patterns so anyone with skill and patience can make these cookies (and cakes, and ice creams etc).

My job is to make the stuff look good, and it has been really fun to work with the lighting and setups to achieve that.

It all started a couple of years ago when I shoot some amigurumis in my photo studio for my friends making them as a hobby.

Earlier this year I talked to one of my clients, a book publisher, and they mentioned that they were working on a book about crochet cakes and cookies. When I said that I would be the perfect guy for it, and showed them the amigurumi photos I had taken, is was an easy sell.

Here is how I did the lighting setup for the dog above:
Lighting setup for Amigurumi product photography

As soon as I am finished with the cakes and cookies, I will try to make a post on how I did it. It was not all studio photography involved, we managed to find a day it didn’t rain so we could take some photos outside as well.

Will post more as soon as I can.

One type of product photography that seem to have a growing demand in the photography market is the clean and simple packshot. Usually shot on white background with soft shadows and very even lighting. Easy to use for the clients both in their web shops and printed material.

Even if it seems to be easy to achieve decent looking product photos with a cheap camera and a light tent, many clients of mine have already tried that and wants something a little more professional looking.

My latest assignment in this field was a product shot for a company that sells pills of different kinds, they needed a photo for a magazine ad.

The Brief from my Client

I was in contact with the Art Director who also was in the photo studio during the shot to help me getting the shot exactly as she and the client wanted it. Most of the time I work alone, but having the client or someone from the ad agency assisting helps a lot to avoid any misunderstandings.

In short, they wanted a very open photo, with lots of space around the products, and the background should no be completely white, rather a light grey with some shadows/reflections from the products.

The Studio Lighting Setup

Before the Art Director had arrived with the products, I had prepared a lighting setup using three monolights, all Profoto Compacts.

I didn’t know if we were going to shot the products from an angle, slightly from above maybe, or straight on, so I set up the lights for a setting that allowed either to work.

From the beginning I worked with the post production in mind, I knew I was going to fake the even background in Photoshop so the lighting didn’t need to be perfectly even, as long as it was light enough. I did some test shots with a color correction card to use as a reference later when setting the correct white balance and adjust the colors.

Light 1 – Main Light

The products I shot was quite small, maybe 15 cm (7-8 inches) high, so I used a Profoto Softbox 60 x 90 cm (2 x 3 feet) as my main light from above the table. The light is very large in comparison to the products so the light should be even enough.

I angled the softbox a little towards the products from the camera, but not more than that so I still would have a small shadow directly under the products. If the light comes from a lower position, there will be no shadow and the products would seem to be floating on the background. Not exactly what I or the client wanted.

Light 2 – Side Light and Fill

The idea with a little light from the side was to define the round or cylindrical shape of the plastic bottles. I used a Profoto Strip Softbox 30 x 120 cm (1 x 4 feet) for that. To get the small light on the side even smaller, I added a mask to the softbox that makes opening only 7 centimeters wide (2-3 inches).

The resulting test shots from this setups showed that the side lighting was a little bit too hard. The white plastic material in the bottles was very easy to blow out so I added a reflector with diffusion material to soften the light a bit, between the softbox and the products.

Light 3 – Background Light

As I mentioned earlier, the final image would need a lot of post processing to get the background light grey all around, so this background light was mostly to minimize the risk of getting the edges on the products too dark. A Profoto Softbox Octa 150 cm in diameter (5 feet) did the trick.

Adding shadows

When the right products were in place, the image felt a little flat. The main light together with the light from the side needed a little more shadow (on the other side) to define the shapes of the bottles better.

The easiest way to add shadows in table top photography is just to place something dark close to the product just outside the frame to remove spill light and reflected light.

By some strange reason I didn’t have any black paper or board to use, but I had a black bag that worked just as well. I just placed it on the table near the products and a soft shadow appeared on the left side (as seen from the camera), just enough to make the bottles look like bottles, and not like flat objects.

Shiny transparent pills, and slippery too

The client wanted not only plastic bottles in the picture, but also the small Omega-3 pills. In real life, they look almost golden and very tasty in a way. But as they are transparent they are quite hard to light. Especially if they lie together and the light shines through them in strange ways.

We tried a lot of ways to make them look natural, both as pills and as a whole, but when we tried to make a small pile, they almost looked like fish eggs and that was not at all what we wanted. It was not extremely large caviar we wanted to sell.

Finally we settled for three pills to lie in front of the bottles, but to get them to stay in the right place was not that easy. The pills are quite slippery and I didn’t have any rubber glue or stuff like that, to fix them in one position. After some experimenting we found out that the shell could be made sticky if we just licked on the pills, after that if was just a matter of placing them right.

Separate lighting for separate parts

Now we had the three bottles in their right places, and the three pills as we wanted them. The problem was that the lighting that made the bottles look good almost blew out the semi-transparent pills.

They didn’t look golden or tasty at all. Next time I think I will try to set up the lights in two different ways and then combine the photos into one.

The solution this time was to take two different photos, but I just blocked some light with a orange/yellow piece (which also added some more color and saturation) from one of my camera bags for the pill shot to have a better starting point for the retouching of the final image.

In the end, I almost painted the pills in Photoshop as I wanted them, but it made it a lot easier when a had a photo without a lot of blown out highlights to work with.

Retouching, Before & After

This is the final image we shot, unedited directly from the camera.

And this is the final image after post processing but before I enlarged the canvas in Photoshop to make a really big image that made it easy for the client to use it either in portrait or landscape, they would just need to crop it.

I adjusted the colors, removed some dirt from the bottles, added a little shadow on the bottle to the right and painted the pills so they looked like we wanted them to. Moved them a bit down as well.

The background was removed with a clipping path and then added back in with a layer mask to use some of the shadow and reflection on the surface in front of/below the products.

A final note

This is not how I use to work. I usually like to set up the lights and take pictures that needs a little post processing as possible. Working this way on ten or thirty or a hundred product images would never work for me. It would take too much time and cost too much.

But for one image, it’s fun to see how something as simple as three bottles & three pills could be so hard to create and look so easy in the end.

And the client is happy, so I am happy too.

Recently I was asked to photograph a lot of garment for Swedish fashion designer and brand Fräulein von Hast, she was planning to start a web shop and needed photos of every skirt, blouse, jacket and dress she had available.

For every item she needed at least three, but more often four different angles so the customers can view the front, back and sides of the skirt or jacket they might be interested in.

This is how I set the light, planned the day and shot 325 photos.

The brief

As I mentioned earlier, the reason for this photo shoot was to produce photos for her web shop, every item must be photographed from three different angles. The model must be on the exact same spot (almost) in every picture and the background needed to be white or very light grey.

The workflow

We had neither time or money to do extensive retouching on every photo, five minutes of Photoshop on 325 photos adds up to almost a whole week. So we planned the work flow to consist of only the studio part and rely on Lightroom to do the post processing for us.

Every photo had the same adjustments applied, and as soon as we very happy with the results from a few test photos, one click on the “Export”-button was enough.

To be sure that the settings I applied in Lightroom would work on every item, I took some samples from very white dresses, very black dresses and some colourful ones. Together with test shots and a grey card, the white balance stayed the same in every photo.

The studio lighting setup

I didn’t feel the need for a completely white background, as long as every photo has the same light background tone and shadows. Personally, I think that a light grey background works better in displaying everything from white to black than a blown out white one.

Four lights and some light modifiers

My idea with the studio lighting was to set a light that was big enough to cover the model and her clothing, without making the images seem too flat. Adding a little contrast and shadows makes it easier to understand how the garments will fit without hiding too much detail.

Main light

The key/main light is actually two flash heads with different light modifiers. The Profoto Softbox Octa (5 foot/150 cm) from camera right creates a soft light for the whole scene, including the background.

The Profoto White Softlight Reflector (beauty dish) camera right also, but a little higher up, adds a bit of contrast and shadows.

I tried this setup earlier and liked the results, you can see it here together with some examples; Lighting setup for fashion dad & daughter

Fill light

To avoid making the model’s right side too dark, I used the third light (Profoto Compact 300) as fill, the easiest way in my small photo studio was to point it toward a corner of the room and let the white walls act as a V-card or book end.

On the Profoto Compact I used a standard reflector and placed a black piece of cardboard to shield the camera and lens from flare. By adjusting the height of the light it is easy to control the direction the fill light comes from, but the main point is just to add a little more light in the room. For more control over the the fill, some sort of light modifier is probably better, as well as pointing it toward the model, not the other way.

Rim light

To create some sort of separation from the light grey background, I used the last of the four flash heads from behind in a Strip Softbox (1′x6′/30×180 cm) together with a soft grid to control the light beam and spill a little.

Pointed toward the back of the model, slightly upwards a bit to avoid creating a light pattern on the floor, the effect is maybe most visible in her face. In the photos where she is turned left or right, it helps by adding a strip of light.

Subtracting light

My photo studio is very small as you might see in the photos, and wanting to define her body and clothing with a darker edge camera left I had to reduce the reflections from the white wall.

The easiest solution was to place two stands and a roll of black background paper to create a black wall, like a big black flag.

I think I could have made the effect stronger by placing the black background closer to her, but this worked fine and I wanted her to have some space to move.

The result

The photo above is very close to how the final images came out. I made the background a little lighter and removed some vignetting to create a more even light grey tone all over.

As I write this, the web shop is not quite ready to open, so I don’t know if they have removed the small piece of duct tape at her feet.

What I have learned

Most of the photo shoot went really smooth. Working with a professional model is very nice for a change, most of my work as a photographer consists of taking pictures of people that has ordinary jobs. Not as models. So having a professional saves a lot of time, and makes everything easier (than having a friend model, for example).

Changing clothes takes time. Even with a professional model and a fashion designer, the biggest part of the day I think was spent getting out of or into new clothes. Adding another dresser (?) and another model would have let me work twice as fast.

Delete delete delete. Easiest way to speed up the post processing part (apart from getting the light right) is to reduce the number of files that you have to transfer to the computer and then import to Lightroom. Deleting the bad ones directly in the camera saves a lot of time.

Equipment used

• Nikon D700
• Nikon 24-70mm/2.8
• 5 st SanDisk Extreme IV CF 4 GB memory card
• Pocket Wizard radio transmitter
• Manfrotto camera stand
• White paper background
• Assorted light stands
• Autopoles
• Black background paper
• 2 st Profoto Compact 300
• 1 st Profoto Compact 600R
• 1 st Profoto AcuteB 600R + flash head
• 1 st Profoto White Softlight Reflector (beauty dish)
• 1 st Profoto Softbox Octa (5 foot/150 cm)
• 1 st Profoto Strip Softbox (1×6/30×180 cm + soft grid)
• Duct tape

Post processing

I used Lightroom 2.7 for the post processing part (Lightroom 3 was not yet installed when I did this job). Capture NX2 can sometimes produce wonderful results, but when dealing with a large amount of files it slows down to a crawl and becomes unusable.

The main thing I did in Lightroom was to set the white balance for all photos, add a little contrast and sharpening, not much more.

For some more photos, have a look in my portfolio

Don’t hesitate to ask if there is something I missed.

A while ago I photographed some Amigurumis in my photo studio for friends who likes to knit small stuffed toys. The result can be seen above and on Flickr if you click on the image.

Lighting small toys is one thing, but getting the light right for wool and threads is quite tricky, especially light colours. To get the structure visible but not blowing out the highlights takes some testing.

Studio Lighting for Product Photography

Crispy and controlled main light

To get the structure in the knitting I setup a Profoto Softlight reflector with a grid as my main light. Mainly because of the relatively large size of the beauty dish, but also because that was the biggest light shaping tool I had at the moment that could be fitted with a grid. And the grid was useful in controlling the light into a beam that did not hit the background, only the toy.

Snoot and gel for background effect

From this angle, without any light on the bakground, the object would have been a bit boring. So I used another flash placed under the table with a snoot to create a small coloured gradient on the background.

The size of the gradient light on the background (and the lightness) could be adjusted by moving the flash nearer or more far away from the background (at the same time giving different gradients with a hard or soft falloff). The background was a white paper, which made it easy to tint with a coloured gel on the flash/snoot. I think I used filter gels from Rosco or Lee?

Different angles – different effects

As the background was near the table I shoot the toys on, some of the background light spilled back and tinted the black glossy plate (from IKEA) they stood on.

When I shot from a low angle, the light on the background became a circular gradient that went from a clear colour in the middle to back on the edges. But moving the camera up a bit, the light from the background tinted the reflective surface more clearly and the gradient became a part of the “floor”.

Postprocessing and retouch

The main part of the retouch was to enhance the contrast on the threads so they stood out even more against the background. Selective sharpening and a little masking on contrast layers took care of that.

If you want to see more of knitted toys, I recommend a visit here (my friends who did the knitting).

Some friends of mine started knitting small toys, more known as amigurumi, which is a japanese thing. Please visit their blog Virkamera (in Swedish only, but the pictures speak for themselves) for more examples.

I helped them with some studio shots of the amigurumis when I had some time to spare. The result came out pretty nice, I think. Some are cute, others are creepy.

Amigurumi dog in sunset, sort of.

I think this is the amigurumi Corporate Zombie together with Nosferatu.

And here is the Amugurumi group shot, Nosferatu, Corporate Zombie, Little Knight, Lucia and some alien-looking gut/girl.

Photographing products in a studio setting is fun, but when trying to keep every little detail and highlight in the threads of yarn it gets a bit tricky. In some of the shots I let the highlights get blown out, but if given more time it would be relatively easy to make a composite shot (one with normal exposure combined with an underexposed for the highlights) to keep all the small details.

Here are some more product photos of the Amigurumis on Flickr from the same session if you are interested.

Or visit my portfolio for larger images (in Swedish only).

Use them if you like

If you want to use the Amigurumi-pictures from Flickr on your own blog, it is ok for me, if you link back to this page or my stuff on Flickr. These photos are marked Creative Commons, so use them according to the licence. Thanks.