Basic Product Photography Lighting, Part 2

We're looking at ways to improve the lighting in your home selling business's product photography. In Part 1, we looked at the main sales-killing technical problems that poor lighting leads to.

The main problem most people are going to have is that there's just not enough light to work with. The best solution is to add light with a flash, which isn't as expensive or difficult as people generally think, but many people prefer shooting with natural light. This has its limitations — it means you're relying on the weather for an important part of your sales strategy — but it may work for you. In any event, there are some techniques to improve the quality of your light no matter what the source, and we'll look at them first. If you're regularly shooting at a decent ISO, like 400 or lower, and are still getting a shutter speed that's at least 1/250 (or say 1/100 if you have a tripod), you have enough light that you can control it a bit and still get a good exposure.

 Make It Bigger

What a diffuser, like a softbox or umbrella, is doing to light

The most important factor affecting the quality of your light is the size of the source. A larger light source — whether it's physically larger, made larger with a diffuser or reflector of some kind, or even just closer to the subject — will help you keep the contrast under control. The shadows will be less murky and softer edged, and the highlights will be less "hot" and flat. The overall dynamic range of the scene won't be so extreme that your camera can't capture it, so the image it produces will be of a higher quality with richer colors. And as a bonus, this soft light looks more appealing to most people. You solve a lot of problems with this technique.

How do we actually do it, though? Sometimes, it's done for us. Photographers who say they love natural lighting often mean indirect sunlight coming through the windows and reflecting off the walls, which is a naturally large light source. So is an overcast but bright day, or the "Golden Hour" around dawn and dusk. (High noon on a clear day is natural light too, but gives very hard and awkwardly-placed shadows, so it's not always a good thing. The sun is a pretty big light source, but it's so far away that its apparent size is pretty small.)

A good solution is to use some sort of diffusion on your main light. This is basically a translucent surface that catches a lot of light from a small light source, and redirects it from a much larger area. It basically becomes a very large, very soft light source, even though it's not actually creating the light. There are also reflectors that achieve the same goal by bouncing the light back. I'll refer to both as diffusers here, since there are a lot of light modifiers that can work as either. You'll get the best results using them with a flash, because all diffusers do cost you some light, but you can really use it with any light source that's powerful enough to begin with.

The cheapest and simplest diffuser is an umbrella (not the kind you'd use in the rain, though they're basically built the same way). They're very easy to use. You can shoot the light through the outer surface, or you can bounce the light off the inner surface. In either case, just imagine it's a giant spotlight shining on your product and aim it — because it's so large and soft, it's really hard to miss.

Typically you'd want an umbrella, a light stand to hold it, and a shoe mount to connect them. The Westcott 2332 43-Inch Collapsible Umbrella Flash Kit is a good solution. It's not super-cheap ($70) but it's a very good value: the umbrella and stand are large enough to shoot most products, even small furniture; the pieces of the kit are not terribly cheap or flimsy; and it's very compact when not in use. Except for a camera, a flash, and a connector, all of which we'll talk about soon, this is really all you need for a basic, powerful light kit. The umbrella that comes in this kit has a removable black cover, so you can use it as a reflective or a shoot-through umbrella; I generally use it as a shoot-through because I can place it much closer to the subject that way, and that makes it a larger and therefore softer light source.

Don't Waste Light

You can also use a reflector to bounce some of the wasted light that would normally be outside your scene back onto your subject, softening shadows and lightening the subject. This isn't going to get you a lot of light, but it can help with the quality of what you have. The nice thing is that it's really, really cheap and easy.

Both were taken in afternoon sunlight, ISO 400, 1/40th second at f/5.0.

Take these photos of some snail shells. By itself, the sunlight was giving me (barely) enough for a good exposure, since I was using a tripod. I ended up increasing the exposure of both by +2/3 in post, which I could easily do because I shot RAW.

The sunlight was already nice and soft because it's a cloudy day, and my kitchen doesn't get direct sunlight in the afternoon.  That means the shadows aren't going to be particularly hard-edged. But in the top image, the shadows underneath and between the shells are a little dark. I'd like to see that the shadows are there, because that helps define the texture and shape of the shells, but I don't want them to hide anything.

I fixed this by taking a sheet of white printer paper and holding it just to the right of the shells — the opposite side of the light source. The sunlight bounced off the paper to fill in those shadows, adding about a third of a stop of light to the scene. The original is usable, but the second try is better. You can see underneath the right-most shell and the edges are less exaggerated, without losing the shade completely.

Reflectors are easy to use, especially in natural light where you can see what effect they're having instantly.  The key trick is to identify the areas that need more light and positioning the reflector so it's reaching those areas. On its own, it wouldn't fix an un-lit scene, but it helped this under-lit one. Larger subjects, like a model wearing clothing, would need a much larger reflector because you'll need to bounce much more light.

This is definitely a tool that's easy to DIY. Printer paper and posterboard are pretty cheap, for example, or a white sunlit wall. If you find yourself in shooting scenarios like this often, you may want to consider something like the Westcott 40" 5-in-1 reflector. The main advantages to a professional reflector over a DIY solution are durability, ease of use and storage, and color consistency (I'll talk more about that later, but for now know that "white" paper is never really white). This 5-in-1 reflector also works as a few other tools, including a diffuser. The disadvantage is that it costs about $30 — and note that this reflector is not a complete kit like the umbrella I linked to above, so you'd need something to hold it in place. Because it's probably not going to be a make-or-break item for most people, I wouldn't say this is the first place to put your money, but you may find that it's a good value for your workflow.

These are two basic, relatively cheap techniques that are fairly easy to use. Diffusing the main light and bouncing back from a different angle to fill in shadows will get you very, very far. It's not the most jaw-droppingly creative thing you can do with light, but it will help you get your product photography past the first worst hurdles. You're probably going to find that it's just not enough light though, and for that, you'll need a flash.