Every once and a while Jenn gets asked about the photos in her shop. I’m proud to be her photo guy!

I’ve had the privilege to do a lot of product photo shoots with Teague’s photographer Doug Evans. And he’s shared more than a few tips with me. Thanks, Doug!

 

Here’s my little set-up:

• Camera: Canon 20D
• Lens: Canon EFS 17-85 mm IS zoom
• Lighting: 3 500 watt tungsten heads
• Ground: a sheet of clear plexiglass (from Home Depot) on top of white foam core (from Staples)
• Backdrop: more white foam core

 

 

 

I love my camera. I’ve had it for a couple years and it has never let me down. If you’re interested in photography, I highly recommend getting a digital SLR. I had 35 mm EOS 650 since high school and had a lot of fun with it, but it wasn’t until I started shooting digital that I (think) I really started to understand photography.

Now for the dumpster diving. My lights were a lucky find. One day while walking past a dumpster I saw a big black suitcase-looking thing. Curious, I pulled it out and found a nice little set of photo lights! I used them as decoration for a long time until Jenn needed photos of her products. I tried using desk lamps, but my exposures were way too long to be useful. So I plugged in those lights I had found long ago, and they worked! I’ve used them for all the 900-some photos I’ve shot for Jenn.
Oddly enough, my tripod was a dumpster find too. Either I’m lucky or I have a problem.

 

Happy shooting!

 

 

Update!

A few things came to mind after I posted this, um, post.

I didn’t mention that I try to shoot at f5.6 with a 72 mm focal length. This is the max that my lens will do. Sometimes 72 mm is a bit too long because my tripod can’t get up high enough or whatever, but that’s my goal. Of course, being a non-full-frame sensor on the Canon means it’s really like shooting at about 115 mm. Shooting at f5.6 gives me a fair amount of shallow depth of field effect.

My exposures are usually about 1/20 of a second. I did mention that shooting with a desk lamp resulted in exposures too slow to be useful, and 1/20 isn’t really a fast shutter speed either, but it’s way faster than what I was shooting at. I would love to have some real flashes, but that is getting too fancy even for me - unless I found some in a dumpster.

I shoot RAW format and do all my image processing in iPhoto 7. I love iPhoto. It does a great job with RAW files and I love that the latest version makes nondestructive edits to your files - like Aperture, but cheaper. I do much of my exposure and gamma correction in iPhoto along with any white balance tweaks. I calibrate my camera when I shoot, but sometimes there is a slight drift a few K here and there. Did I mention that I love iPhoto?

I do any pixel level editing in Photoshop. Usually this involves miscellaneous touch-up and bleaching out the background to a pure white. I try to get the background pure white during the shoot, but in evitably, there is a bit of vingetting due to the zoom lens, or I have to shoot just slightly dark to capture the texture in the white felt that Jenn likes to use. White on white isn’t easy, but that’s what Photoshop is for.

I have some Automator scripts set-up to convert the large 8 megapixel images down to something manageable for the web. I keep 3 versions of every file - the RAW file (in iPhoto) a editted TIFF at full resolution (these are suitable for printing) and the low resolution JPEG. We keep the images cataloged by date and I archive to DVD-ROM at the end of each year.
I also find DIY Photography a great resource for tips and tricks.

I hope the added info was helpful, maybe even interesting…

Cheers,
J.

Tags: 20D, Canon, Jenn, Photography

This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 1:08 am and is filed under Blogger, Learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.