Step-by-Step Product Shoot

Kerry Garrison walks you through the process of shooting a product in a studio. In this case it is a telephone set.

The backgound is lit by two light boxes, only some light from which goes to the product and the rest goes to the white background. If you make your backgorund as bright and clean as possible, it will save you time in post processing your image, as usually product pictures are usually done on white backgound for further useage in print.

Kerry measured the exposure of the backgound as well as the product and the difference between them was just one stop. The right exposure for this shoot is f8 and the shutter speed 1/15 sec. He also used a gray card for measuring the white balance but he did no WB adjustments inside the camera, istead he would use the gray card image when he does the post processing for easy white balance correction.

He uses 50mm prime lens as it produces the image with least distortion.

Once he found the right exposure and memorized the white balance, he switched to a live mode on his camera to achieve precise focussing on the subject. Using magnification allows you to fine tune your focus manually.

And finally, when doing the final shoot, he set a 2 sec timer to avoid any camera shake.

Good luck!

Source may be found here.