Product shot

All righty. The hardest one.

I had troubles of finding a product I really wanted to shoot. Everything I thought of felt boring and pointless. That is, until I accidentally saw and remembered this donald duckish soft water bottle I got as a part of my birthday present from a friend (since you really want to know: it was a first aid hangover -kit). It’s the kinda thing Donald puts on his bruised head when he’s been beaten up by Daisy, you know.

I did take some ordinary product shots of the soft bottle with a water glass and some painkillers in the background, but they turned out rather boring. Since the assignment was to take four pictures (three portraits and one landscape for doublepage spread) I had planned to combine both typical product shots and pictures of people having the thing on their head. After taking one picture with a person (which didn’t end up on these final four), I immediately scrapped that plan and decided to focus on people. Much more interesting and much more possibilites.

I didn’t want to draw too much attention to the persons themselves, but rather to the situation (and the pain) they’re in. Each picture works by itself, but also as a group. I didn’t have the time to manufacture a logo for the thing and that might be the only gripe I have with these adds. It is quite clear however what the product in these pics is.

Each of these pictures were taken with the same lighting setup, which you can see here:

The main flash was on the right, pointing down on the subject. The highest flash on the left was to provide light for the other side of subject and also to the front. Then one more flash was aimed to the background so that it’d glow white. Some extra spotlights with umbrellas were used especially on the horizontal picture to get rid of annoying shadows.

I gotta admit two of the following shots were happy accidents. I would say something to the person modelling, distracting them for a while and just start shooting. But that is a secret, officially they’re all deeply well-thought beforehand and include some super acting. The grey border is there only so that they wouldn’t blend in with my blog background.

(ISO 100, 1/125, f/14)