Friday December 17, 2004
Product
TranzPort

Jerry Halstead: product photographer. ":^)

I took a bunch of shots of our new product TranzPort the other day. This shot caught my eye.

Taking product shots is quite a process.

You need to get even light distribution, avoid glare and hot spots, not lose all of the shadows but also not get the wrong type of shadow, ensure good focus but reduce depth of focus to blur the background. Afterwards there's lint cleanup in photoshop...hey, where'd that come from?

Oh, and make the product look good.

Another challenge is white balance. I'm using fluorescent bulbs and it seems like each one has its own color temperature. Luckily RAW files can have their temperature adjusted when the file is brought into photoshop.

Speaking of which, we went for a long hike this weekend and filled the camera with a gig of photos. Got back and discovered that I'd left the camera in fluorescent white balance. Every photo was a gruesome shade of blue. Photoshop CS to the rescue: the file browser can automate RAW changes across a selection of images.

Here's another shot, of my friend Dwight's product.


Jetboil


Pedraum • 2004-12-17 12:25am

We did all our own product shots at walmart.com; there's an in-house studio and all. It's much more complicated than I'd ever imagined. Well done.
Peer • 2004-12-17 08:34pm

Very nice and even shot!