If you have read some of my older posts you’ll know that I am involved in a charity called FebFast. Involvement with charities seems to run in the family at the moment.
My wife (aka “the lovely Mrs A”) is helping a fledgling charity by the name of “I Give a Buck” (or IGAB as we know it around these here parts). It’s is a very different premise to FebFast – they and they aim to help raise funds for children whose needs fall through the cracks of the normal welfare system. Check them at at IGAB.
Anyway, IGAB wanted an image that they could use to promote one of their fund raising ideas – to sell bags of sweets. I, of course, volunteered for completely selfish reasons. I have to say, at first I was a bit daunted, but the end result turned out pretty good, don’t you think?
Nice shot! What did you use for the base? Maybe in future accompanying some of these shots you can have a shot of you + set-up by even a p&s so that us mere mortals know how these kinds of shots are done!
Cheers Nick, I know you are an aficionado, so your praise means a great deal!
It’s pretty standard product shot fare – Blue card as a backdrop, curved at the bottom to form an infinity cove. The lollies are sitting on a well cleaned piece of glass that reflects the colour of the backdrop and the object nicely.
The challenge was in the lighting set-up, was resolved in two stages:
I wanted a shallow depth of field to highlight the foreground, so I set my aperture and shutter speed. This meant that I had to play with the power of the flash to get the exposure I wanted.
I used 2 speed-lights – one camera left as a general background light and the other Camera right high as a key light. The background was quite tricky, because I wanted an even lighting across the blue card without any reflected hot spots. Because I was using a glass base, light was bouncing everywhere. There where also wired reflections off the plastic bags. My solution was to come in from a low angle and very wide, so that the light illuminated the scene but did not hit the glass at an angle that shows up on the background. the background light is also creating the bright highlights on the plastic wrapping of the background lolly bags. Once I got that sorted, I then used a second light from high camera right, with snoot & grid-spot to shoot a tight beam of light down onto the loose sweets at the front. Again, it needed to reflect away from anything that formed part of the image, hence why the light was so high. It just bounced stray light up and onto the ceiling.
I can’t recall the lighting ratios between key and background, but I don’t think they were that far apart. If they were, it would only be due to the relative distance between the light and the subject. One was further away (Because I was too lazy to put up a light stand, so I balanced it on the corner of a filing cabinet ;-P