Beginner Product (shirts) Shoot

[brandonf22]

The attached picture was already cropped out, I've been using a navy blue background for white, and white background for colored shirts.

The background looks yellow to me.

When you say "cropped" to what are you referring?

I know what I mean when I say cropped, but your sentence above is confusing.

Anyway, yes, I use flash, and I trigger them with a radio-frequency (RF) trigger system.

Softboxes (such as you already own) are what most people will use to modify their flashes.

The background was navy, I cropped that out and added the yellow background for my website.

You are right to use the self-timer's delay function on long exposures. You can get VEWRY sharp images with exposures in the 1.5 to 3 second range, at low ISO levels, and at smallish f/stoops, like f/8 to f/11, as long as the camera is on a tripod and the subject does not move at all.

The wrinkles on the shirts look bad to me. Have you heard of the ghost mannequin method of shooting shirts? It shows the label AND makes the shirt look more three-dimensional and just, well...better.

If you are doing non-living, fixed subject matter, there is not a huge advantage to strobes; the real problem is convincing so many people that a longer exposure, like 1.5 to 2.0 seconds, is often actually SHARPER than a 1/4 to 1/15 second shot. Continuous lights do not put out a lot of high-intensity light, but they do give a WYSIWYG effect, which can help beginners.

You NEED to take CONTROL over the white balance setting part of the process, however! NEVER leave it in auto white balance--always set that.

This is interesting to me! So I should experiment with longer exposures, with low ISO levels and small f stops to make a crisper shirt?

Yes, there are wrinkles on the shirt example I used, I want that same look but my shirts will obviously have less wrinkles. I was more interested in the well lit shirt and graphic.

 

[Derrel]

I'm not a product pro, but I've browsed many a t-shirt site and rumpled t-shirts seem very unappealing. Especially when you typically have ridiculously cute girls modeling the shirts (as many MANY sites do).

Emphasis added by me on the cute girls, modeling the product. I do not mind a stylized, deliberately placed wrinkle or two I guess, but I'd rather see bumps than wrinkles...I mean...there are a LOT of T-shirt sites...you will be in competition with many other vendors--so you might as well go with the most-logical way to sell clothing: with real,live,attractive men and women in the shirts. It's just the classier way to go, and connotes a higher grade of merchandise, and a more-established vendor. Even the ghost mannequin method looks better than the flat,empty garment look.

YES--with a self-timer delay and a decent tripod, it's easy to shoot a longer exposure shot, like say 2 or 3 seconds, at f/9.5 or f/10 or f/11--to get the WHOLE garment into good, clear focus. Not having the item in 100% sharp focus looks substandard to most people. As stated, a longer timed shutter speed, 1.5 to 3 seconds, even 45 seconds, works perfectly fine for small product tabletop shooting. If the objects are perfectly motionless, there's no reason you can not soot a 2- to 5-secon d exposure with continuous lighting.

Continuous lights that are well-suited to photographing people are VERY expensive; electronic flash units that can shoot people well are not all that expensive.

 

[brandonf22]

Thanks for the help guys. Like I said, my shirt will not have wrinkles.... It will be ironed and steamed. I just wanted the same lighting effects and sharpness as the sample I included.

Is my 18-55 lens good enough for this?

 

[Derrel]

18-55 lens is adequate, as long as there's not a ton of stray or reflected light blasting its front element. And YES...almost any modern lens is amply good enough for shooting clothing at f/8 to f/16. You're shooting for small-size end-use images, right? Not in-store, 40x60 inch display images.

 

[brandonf22]

Yes, small sized images just for my website.

I usually kept white balance on auto, what is recommended for this?

 

[Derrel]

Shoot in raw mode, or raw + JPEG, small-sized, fine compression. Set the WB to a fixed value....one that's set to say, Fluorescent, or Incandescent, or even a Custom WB....this makes editing easier--and prevents a blue shirt or a yellow shirt from vastly skewing the AUTO WB setting.

 

[brandonf22]

Here are some shots I took tonight. I think these are coming out better... but still have room to go! These have obviously not had the background cropped yet... just wanted to show you guys the setup prop im using.

 

[Derrel]

It would be soooo much better if you had a larger sheet of board to lay the shirts down onto...a roll of seamless backdrop paper would be very handy for you. I like that shirt with the bass plug on it!

 

[brandonf22]

What would a larger board achieve? Im very new to this, I apologize if I sound dumb!

As far as the lighting and such, am I getting "warmer"?

 

[dennybeall]

The larger board would allow the shirt to fit on a white background without appearing crammed in.
I just looked at the last two shots and they are not bright. Hard to explain but look in a clothes catalog and the items pop out at you with bright colors. The blue shirt is just a blue shirt..................no texture or vibrant colors.

 

[brandonf22]

The larger board would allow the shirt to fit on a white background without appearing crammed in.
I just looked at the last two shots and they are not bright. Hard to explain but look in a clothes catalog and the items pop out at you with bright colors. The blue shirt is just a blue shirt..................no texture or vibrant colors.

What can I do to make the shirt pop more with my setup?

 

[Designer]

What would a larger board achieve? Im very new to this, I apologize if I sound dumb!

As far as the lighting and such, am I getting "warmer"?

When I say "cropped" what I am referring to is cutting off edges of the frame so the subject is pretty much the only thing left in the frame. If you've got lights showing on the sides, trim them off by "cropping". The frame is still rectangular, but you will not longer see the lights because you've cropped them out of the frame.

Placing a tee shirt on a piece of foamcore that is only just a little bit wider than your shirt might work except in this case because of the "keystoning" of the rectangle. You can no longer simply trim off the dark edges in a rectangular crop because you will inadvertently trim off part of your shirt as well.

Now if the foamcore was substantially wider than the tee shirt, you could go ahead and trim off the dark edges and never mind the fact that the rectangular board looks "keystoned" in shape due to the lens distortion.

Of course, there are at least two different ways to crop this image, but here are the two that I did to attempt to illustrate my point:

In the first, I trimmed off all of the dark floor, leaving mostly white foamcore, but lost part of the shirt.

In the second, I trimmed close to the shirt, being careful not to trim any of the shirt, but since your foamcore looks tapered, this is what I was left with.

That is what he meant my using a larger sheet of foamcore.

 

[Designer]

By the way; the "keystoning" affects the shape of the shirt as well as the foamcore, so if you don't mind having your shirts look wider at the tails than at the shoulders, then keystoning is o.k. for you.

Personally, I would not want to purchase a shirt that has had its tail already stretched out.

Have you noticed how clothing stores pose a tee shirt on a mannequin and tie off the bottom to make the bottom of the shirt look smaller? You're going the opposite way.