This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Working with Lighting
I’ve talked a bit about lighting throughout this chapter because lighting is important. It may be the single most important factor in making a good photo look great.
While you can use natural lighting (by shooting outdoors on an slightly overcast day, to avoid direct shadows), you’ll show off your crafts to better effect by shooting indoors with external lighting—not with your camera’s built-in flash. The ideal setup, shown in Figure 4.9, uses two external lights, each positioned at 45-degree angles to the camera-to-subject axis.
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Figure 4.9. The recommended lighting setup for product photos.
You’ll get even better results by using some sort of diffuser or softbox on each light flood. This puts a nice soft light on all the parts of the item, more or less equally.
NOTE
A softbox is a translucent fabric “box” that attaches directly to a photoflood, serving to diffuse or soften the source light.
If you don’t have external lights, you can use a speed light attached to your camera, instead. The key here is to configure the speed light for bounce lighting; bounce the light off the ceiling above you or the wall behind. On no condition should you use the direct lighting of your camera’s built-in flash.