Basic Product Photography Lighting, Part 1

It may seem strange that I'm talking about lighting your product photographs before talking about cameras themselves.  The camera is actually one of the easiest pieces of the puzzle to do right, though, and learning a few basics about lighting will get you 90% of the way to where you want to be.  It's the fundamental concept in photography, really.  I don't mean just learning about strobes and umbrellas, but how a camera depends on the light in a scene.

When we think about lighting, we're really thinking about two related concepts.  The first is controlling the light in the scene so that the camera is able to make a good exposure that doesn't have any distracting technical problems.  The second is using light for dramatic, creative effects.  Generally speaking, we'll focus on the first meaning here — lighting for effect is fun and interesting, but first things first. This is going to be a practical and efficient approach, to get you started.

I do want to say that lighting has an intimidating and steep learning curve when you first dive in. I don't mean to scare you off — you should just be aware that everyone finds it difficult at first. That's normal. You'll be learning how all the gear fits together, what effect the light actually has on your photographs, and how to control all of that at the same time, so it's a lot of new concepts to grasp at once. So don't worry if it takes a bit of time before it clicks.  Fortunately it's really not difficult to do what you need for basic product photography.

What Can Go Wrong?

Before we look at what we need to do to shoot our products, let's take a minute to consider the technical challenges that get in the way.

One problem is that the light in most of our homes is really dim, too dark to easily make a good exposure.  The camera has three ways to deal with this, and each one leads to other compromises.

• It can increase the sensitivity of its sensor (the ISO rating) so that it needs less light to make the exposure, which also increases the amount of noise, or individual pixels that show a totally random color or brightness. Many consumer cameras unfortunately don't get very usable results at high ISOs.
• It can open the lens up to a larger (we usually say wider) aperture to let more light in, which also decreases how much of the subject is going to be in focus, and its ability to do this depends entirely on the lens.
• It can use a slower shutter speed so that the sensor has more time to collect light, but longer shutter speeds mean any movement in the camera or the subject will blur the final image.
  

These are the basic components to every exposure, and many of your creative decisions will come down to choosing which to prioritize over the others. The problem is that in typical indoor lighting, the camera will have to sacrifice all three to such a degree that the image isn't useful for your storefront.  That means your first goal in lighting your products will be to make sure the camera can make an exposure that doesn't compromise too much on any of them.

There's a second problem with household light fixtures: the image is going to come out with a yellow or orange cast. This is because cameras are surprisingly bad at guessing the color temperature (the natural hue of a light source) of these kinds of bulbs, while our eyes automatically adjust to it.  This subject deserves its own post, but for now, don't worry too much.  It's very easy to work a fix into your product shoots, and there's no need to buy special light bulbs to deal with the problem.

An example of contrast problems from poor product lighting.

A lot of lighting problems stem from the fact that most cameras can't capture a very wide dynamic range between the brightest and darkest points in a scene. Think of the camera's dynamic range as a slot that all the light has to fit through.  Any part of the scene that's too far to one side — too bright or too dark — won't be recorded in the photograph. It's the visual equivalent of a speaker clipping.  A scene with more dynamic range than the camera can capture will turn into an image with contrast problems, with important areas that lose their detail, or with altered colors; in short, one that just doesn't represent what your product actually looks like.

The image to the right is an example of this. Would you be able to tell that this is a green metal bottle? Can you tell for sure what kind of green it is, or what sort of surface texture it has? Look at how the highlights don't merge into the areas around them, and instead sort of blotch up.  Look at the shadow regions along the edge of the bottle, and how you can't really tell where the bottle ends and the background begins.  The lighting is very restricted, so parts of the bottle are getting too much light, most none at all, and only a small area is getting enough to expose it normally. This is a great water bottle, but this photo will never sell it to anyone.

Our eyes do a much, much better job of seeing in difficult lighting than cameras, and this gives us really poor instincts about what cameras can actually do.  A good camera might be able to capture nine or ten stops of light at once, while the human eye can capture about twenty.  A stop is a generic unit of measurement in photography, where +1 stop of something doubles it — so that ten-stop difference is not a 2x difference, it's a 1024x difference.  (Stops are used to measure everything to do with exposures, so you'll hear it referring to light or time, or sometimes ISO sensitivity.)

This problem is made worse by the fact that the camera's computer often can't tell what's most important in the scene.  You may not really care if the window in the background is overexposed or not, but the camera may decide to underexpose the whole scene just to protect that little trivial bit.  We'll talk more about how to get the camera to stop making dumb choices later, but it's something to watch out for in any case.

The last big problem is the quality of the light itself.  This is the one that takes the most work to address, but dealing with has the fortunate side-effect of dealing with all the dynamic range problems. It means looking at the light for all its creative possibilities and using it to define the shape and texture of your product in a flattering way. I pointed out how the light in the photo above is really reaching a very small area, and that's part of this.  This is a very deep rabbit hole to get into, but we'll start a bit with the next post, where we'll look at different types of light sources and how to control them in order to deal with all the problems we've identified here.

Basic Product Photography For Home Sellers

This is the first post in a new ongoing series, aimed towards business owners whose sales depend on the quality of the photographs of their products, but don't really have much experience behind the camera. If you're selling on Etsy or eBay or your own web site, and you're frustrated because you just can't get the images your products deserve, then I hope this series will be helpful to you.

My assumption here is that you, as your business owner, feel that your product photography is holding back sales and that you’re willing to invest in the equipment and education you need to move it forward. The setups I’ll recommend will range in price, but to do it right from scratch will start at a few hundred dollars. It’s up to you to determine your budget, but as you do, you should keep in mind that this is a legitimate business expense — marketing is not optional, after all.

Your photography setup and workflow need to make business sense. At the moment they probably don't, since they're not supporting your sales. But any money or time you spend to get to that point needs to pay for itself eventually. The upfront costs of the equipment, the cost of your time to learn to use it, and the ongoing cost of your time to shoot and process the products all need to be recouped through your sales. How long are you comfortable taking to pay back this expense? Six months? A year? Longer? If you need to adjust your prices to do this, how will that affect your market?

A toy pachyrhinosaurus, an example of this sort of photography.

And eventually you'll need to replace parts of your photo kit. Fortunately, photo gear can last a long time if you treat it well, and you probably won't have a real need to upgrade every time a new camera body or something comes out. Your workflow won't stop working because somebody else has a bigger lens, after all.

Now, I'm a photographer and not a business specialist, so I'm not really the one to go into detail about how to do all that. You should talk to your tax adviser about making this deductible, and maybe even a local bank or credit union about microloans to make it possible if necessary. If you can’t make a good business case for it or you just don’t have the time or interest to dedicate to it, you may want to consider hiring a photographer to do it for you — for a lot of people, this is the more sensible route. (And heck, if you're in the Boston area or sell easily-shipped items, I might be able to help you out with that, since it's part of my business.)

Ideally, at this point, everything I've said so far is at least a little bit obvious and you're excited to get to the actual photography. Links to the rest of the series are below, or you can click here.

Lighting
Typical Lighting Challenges
Controlling Light With Diffusers and Reflectors

A little busy

Apologies for the total lack of posts this month. It's been a slightly hellish past few weeks and I've barely even picked up the camera. I am working on something big as well, which I'll probably start posting soon.

Etsy

News flash: I've set up a storefront at Etsy, here: http://www.etsy.com/shop/michaelhampson

Right now I have several prints from my Fake Landscapes series for sale. I plan to offer others soon, probably along the lines of books, thin wraps, and metal prints rather than paper. If there's anything specific you're interested in seeing there, let me know.