One of the areas of photography that I enjoy is product photography. One of the reasons is that there is always the challenge of making the product you’re shooting look even better than it is.
As part of building my portfolio, I set myself some challenges along those lines, one of which I present to you here.
My goal with this shoot was to make these $4 sunglasses look like an expensive pair. When you look at advertising of high-end sunglasses with those high-end lens coatings, you always get this warm glow from the lenses; of course, silver mirror-lenses get a completely different treatment.
When shooting reflective surfaces, the photographer’s first worry is to control what is reflected in the surface, as you want to control what is visible in the image. In this case, I allowed the one softbox to reflect, but managed to keep everything else in my studio out of the reflections.
The second tricky part in capturing image is the black. One might think that black is pretty straightforward; if you try to create a black background in camera while lighting your subject, any light spillage results in losing that perfect black. Of course, it can be fixed in post-processing, but it never has that same look that you get from shooting it properly. Judicious utilization of gobos (go between objects), can ensure that no light spills on your precious background.
Note that I added a little bit of light toward the end of the temples, so that they don’t disappear and to add a bit of visual interest.
How much post-processing was done? Very little, as I only had to remove the very thin, non-reflective thread that supported the temples and a smidgen of sharpening.
Oh, and of course, you want to know how much did these sunglasses cost: about $4 at Wal-Mart.
Hope you enjoyed this little tour of a product shot.
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