Product Photography (not quite) 101

For the past few days, Chateau Ricardipus, or at least a very small part of it on and around the dining table, has been transformed into an ad hoc photo studio and marketing operation. In her role as co-chair of our school's Parent Council, Mrs. Ricardipus is spearheading a Spell-a-thon and associated prize draw. The dining room has been taken over with Justin Bieber paraphernalia a-plenty, as well as various toys, gift certificates, and whatnot. Perhaps rashly, I volunteered to take photos of the prizes, to be reproduced at small size to go on ballot boxes, and also as 8 x 10-inch promo posters.

Rashly, I say, because I have this much experience at photographing products:

None.


A really terrible previous attempt.

Never mind - fresh from reading Michael Freeman's Top Digital Photography Tips, I transformed the dining room table into a veritable homonculous of a studio setup. Developing through a few iterations, the final version involved a base and backing of white foamcore, a gently bent piece of bog-standard printer paper as a background, a mirror underneath and a couple of cookie boxes to hold the whole thing up. Side lighting came from a couple of Ikea gooseneck lamps, an el cheapo $25 off-camera flash, a desk lamp, some sunlight through a window, and the pop-up flash on my Nikon D5000. Sheets of white tissue paper diffused the sidelighting.

Predictably, the results looked - well, pretty amateur. The mess of colour temperatures from the natural light, the incandescent lamps and two totally different flashes really messed things up, and there were ugly shadows everywhere, although I got some workable results. This photo, of my newest lens, will give you some idea:


Not too bad, but covered in different coloured reflections, and that shadow is U.G.L.Y.

Fortunately, a couple of Flickr contacts had some good suggestions. Charles suggested this video tutorial - which as well as being amusing, made me feel a little better, since one of the two approaches to budget product shooting involved, you guessed it, two Ikea gooseneck lamps(!). Brian, on the other hand, pointed me at this excellent setup he built, out of a cardboard box, and, wait for it, white tissue paper and desk lamps, among other things. Both of these guys take very nice photos - so I felt a little better.

The next day, I found myself with one more prize to photograph - an iPod nano, in devilishly white, shiny, dust-prone and reflective packaging. Taking further hints from the incomparable Ken Rockwell, particularly on using a glass base to make the shadows "fall" out of shot, I quickly whipped up a new setup, which you can see here, bolting my D5000 on to the trusty old Velbon tripod, setting everything up in front of a mirror and using some handy drawers for the Ikea clip lamps.



Ready, set...

"Battery exhausted."

Yes, I knew it had been running down the previous evening, and no, I hadn't stopped to charge it. All that live view on the LCD screen to frame the shot had finished it off. Do I have a spare battery? Heck no. But at this point, I was bound and determined to get the shot - and so whipped out Mrs. Ricardipus's trusty Sony DSC-R1, and in a fit of supreme laziness, hand-held it more or less next to where the D5000 was sitting on the tripod. And took what turned out to be, I think, a rather nice photo, even if its graininess does show up just how badly the Sony does in low light with the sensitivity turned up to even ISO 400.



Of course, by the time I took this shot, let alone edited it, she'd already found a perfectly good promotional photo, made up the poster, and printed it. But darn it, I got the shot, and that's what really counts, isn't it?

Ye Olde Snowman Tayle

From Junior Ricardipus #1's homework assignment, February 13, 2008:


One day, I was walking home from school. I was walking in a field. It was snowing gently. Then I saw a snowman in the field. When I got to the road, I heard a thump, thump thump behind me. I turned around and saw a snowman moving! It looked just like the snowman I saw in the in the field! I walked more and heard the thump thump again. I turned around and there was the snowman. I said "what an annoying thing" and told it to go away, but it just scrached it's head! I screamed as loud as I could in his ear, but it didn't hear me! So, I just walked home to think of a solution there. When I got home I decided to crush it with my hands. And I did.


Now that's good reading.

One week...

...until next Wednesday. But also one week (roughly) since the beginning of school for the entire Ricardipus clan, except for me. Been there, done that, got a couple of diplomas and no, I don't have to teach medical students any more, thank goodness. Been there and done that too, for five years of graduate school. My sole investment in the new school year, apart from shuttling various and assorted Junior Ricardipi here and there, is in avoiding all of the frosh (translation: freshmen, first-year students) trampling around the downtown campus these days.

But now that Mrs. Ricardipus is off at teacher's college, our home seems to be filling up with binders, exercise books, various important-looking notices and other assorted bits of paper, and textbooks with titles like Engaging Minds: Learning and Teaching in a Complex World, Elementary and Middle School Mathematics, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, and the odd novel like Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, which I might actually read myself. Oh, and American Born Chinese, by Gene Luen Yang, which is also apparently part of the curriculum. It's a graphic novel featuring, among other things, a farting monkey. People who read it may, one day, be teaching your children, you know.

And me? Well, apart from unfortunately having discovered the shoot-em-up fun that is Cube, I'm just plugging away at the usual slog, helping people with grant applications for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (due Monday; thank goodness that will soon be over) and generally failing to answer Black Knight's confusing question about DNA splice junctions (oh, go look it up - actually, don't bother, it's probably not worth it). All in a day's work, really.

It's really that simple?

Right, after all of this faffling around with various modes of transportation, I did, in fact, manage to attend the East Coast Blogmeet. Which I will tell you all about... shortly.*

After which, I flew from there to here (more or less), hopped in the rental car, and drove for about three hours to the other end of Lake Ontario where I attended a high school reunion. I didn't think I'd ever do that, but it was actually kind of fun. I got to revisit some old haunts, including the lighting cage where I spent many hours working on various school plays:


The dear old cage has lots of archaic stuff in it, including this rather attractive set of dimmer levers. If you look carefully, you'll see that there's an on/off switch under each. The wires leading to these switches are not terribly well insulated, and I gave myself a nice zap on one of them on at least one occasion.



But the best part is this:






Boys, Girls. On, Off. Who knew it was that easy?



*Dawn is going to kill me if I don't get around to it soon.

P.S. I just love how the Blogger image upload tool fails, gives you an error code and additional details to report, then fails to provide a link to report it. Try looking around the Blogger website too. Do you see a support link for reporting problems? If it's there, I sure can't find it.