Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Product Shots on a Budget


"Limitations" by Wes Aldridge

Well, you would not believe the trouble I went through shooting this photograph. The long and toiling hours spent in the studio... the contemplation of every minute detail of the shot... the hours upon hours of photo editing.

No. None of that at all.

This shot was taken at my desk at work. Yup. I used my new Canon flash (550EX) on camera to get this one. My desktop was glass, not mirrored, and that is what the computer sits on top of. I shot at 1/15th of a second, without a tripod, by balancing the edge of the camera on the desk. I shot with such a slow shutter speed to eliminate the scan/refresh lines that would have appeared on the computer screen if it were faster. I tilted the monitor a tiny bit to eliminate the flash flare from appearing in the shot.

This was an exercise in how you can get very good photographs without having tons of expensive gear. I shot with an aperture of f/5.0, so you don't even need an expensive Canon "L" series lens at f/2.8 to get a shot like this. You don't even need a backdrop... the orange was simply from the color on the wall behind the desk. Heck, I didn't even clean the glass on the desktop or the glass on the monitor before the shot.

I love to set up intricate studio shots, but this shot is great and it took zero set up or pre-thought. Just some food for thought.

2 comments:

TeoZilla said...

I've recently been thinking about the same thing. Most of this series (the Gerberas) was taken with a vase set on a black folding chair and lit with natural light from my patio door.

It's good to see another photographer using Flickr and Blogger. The photo-a-day project is really interesting. Something I've considered ever since reading Chased by the Light by Jim Brandenburg. Were you similarly inspired?

Wes Aldridge said...

teozilla: Actually I saw where a group of about 8 (I think) photojournalists were doing something like this with news in different regions of the United States. I thought it was interesting and made my own little variation of it and decided to do something similar all by myself.