Learning Product Photography and Looking for Lighting Advice

[CrazyChef]

Hi folks,

I figured it was time to stop lurking and actually introduce myself. My name is Phil and I’ve been getting more serious about photography lately and right now I’m mainly focusing on product photography.

Most of what I’m interested in working on is small tabletop stuff. Things like guitar effects pedals, small kitchen products, various types of packaged items, that sort of thing. I’m trying to get to the point where I can consistently shoot clean commercial quality product photos. Eventually I want to start learning food photography as well.

I’m still very much in the learning phase and trying to really understand the fundamentals. Exposure, depth of field, lighting, reflections, all the things that make product shots look clean instead of amateur.

My current gear setup is:

Camera: Nikon D5300
Nikon 40mm Micro-Nikkor f/2.8
Sigma 105mm f/2.8 Macro
Nikon 18-55 kit lens

Most of my shooting right now is tripod-based tabletop setups while I experiment with lighting and camera settings.

Speaking of lighting, that’s probably the area I’m trying to improve the most right now. If anyone here has recommendations for solid but reasonably affordable lighting for product photography, I’d really love to hear what’s worked for you. Right now I’m using some cheap lighting that’s pretty amateurish that I got from Amazon.

So I’m curious - If you were starting over today and wanted a good but inexpensive lighting setup, what would you buy first?

Anyway, glad to be here and looking forward to learning from the community.

Phil

[Manfred M]

From a lighting standpoint you can either go with continuous lights or flash (small flash / speedlights) or studio lights. As in all photography, lighting is what makes or breaks an image.

I would recommend staying away from the inexpensive continuous lights that you can pick up at your local building supply or hardware store as they are not built for colour accuracy and you will be fighting them all the time. The other problem is that they are not really built to accept light modifiers, which is something you will use in your work as you gain experience.

I am a still life photographer (product photography is a still life genre) and use a combination of studio lights and speedlights in my work. I do not use continuous lights because they output less power and don't let me freeze motion (something I use a in a lot of my work).

One advantage of continuous lights are that they let you see what you get more easily when you are getting started. Modeling lights on studio flash (and some speedlights) come close. This is especically important when setting things up and when you are working with shadows, light quality and light direction.

I typically use at least two lights (with modifiers) in a shot; a key light and a fill light. I will often add accent lights as well for effect and will use coloured gels on my flash) as well as gobos for lighting effects. In multiple light setups I will use an incident flash meter to do the basic setup of my lighting ratios.

I shoot 100% manual for both camera and flash. You don't want the inconsistency of automation in either as your results will be all over the place. Make sure you set your camera up so that you use single point focus and ensure that you turn off autofocus when you depress the shutter release half way. Otherwise your focus will be quite inconsistent.

I use a tripod and / or a camera stand in all my work. I use a geared head, rather than a more common ball head for this type of work because it allows for very fine camera position adjustments

I shoot tethered (to my laptop) pretty well 100% of the time when working in a studio. The larger screen is invaluable in checking focus and the setup. Lightroom and Capture One have this functionality. Nikon had a Capture software as well. Assuming that your camera supports tethering you will need an appropriately long cable to do the tethering.

Start with the lenses that you have. The 40mm is probably a bit short, the kit 18 - 55mm is probably fine at the longer focal lengths. The 105mm might be a bit long. Shoot the lowest ISO setting you can get away with and I suspect that f/8 - f/11 will likely be good aperture settings to start with.

I hope that this helps / makes sense.

[CrazyChef]

Wow, that's a lot of information to digest, but HIGHLY appreciated - thank you!

[Manfred M]

No problem.

I do a lot of still life work and what I do is often very close to product photography, it is really fine art photography and all of the images have been shown in galleries.

[CrazyChef]

Those are some FANTASTIC phots! And thank you again for the advice!