Photographing my own products for website: lighting

[Sarahs999]

Hello, I hope some of you can help me. I'm not a professional photographer, but I am putting together a website for my new business, and want to photograph all the products against a white backdrop. I'm using my trusty old canon eos 300d. I've watched various tutorials on using soft boxes but we have quite a range of things - from furniture down to bags of fudge, so obviously not everything will fit in a box. I want to try and get a uniform look and realise the lighting is key. But I have no idea what to buy. We have very little cash but obviously want to do it as well as possible. I've seen I need 5000k daylight bulbs. Do I need 3 lights or will 2 do? What lights are budget but good enough? And lastly, do I need some sort of diffuser across the light if I'm not using a soft box?

Thanks so much - I'm really a total beginner at this so please don't assume I know anything!

 

[Overread]

Light Science and Magic - 4th edition. Get a copy from your library or buy the book, its a detailed book on lighting for beginners which deals with working with multiple light sources and also multiple product types and materials. It will give you a wealth of information that will make your work a lot easier, plus it will make it a lot easier to start choosing what equipment will be best for you to use to take the photos that you need.

 

[Big Mike]

I completely agree. Get 'Light: Science & Magic'. Read it, follow it, live it.

 

[KmH]

I've seen I need 5000k daylight bulbs. Do I need 3 lights or will 2 do? What lights are budget but good enough? And lastly, do I need some sort of diffuser across the light if I'm not using a soft box?

+1 on - Light Science and Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting

For products as big as furniture you may need as many as 5 or 6 lights to have a consistent look with the small products.
You may need some reflectors to add light, some black flats to subtract light, and some 'flags' to block light.
Reflectors and black flats can be as simple as sheets of white and black foam board. A 'flag' can be anything that will block light.
On a budget, umbrellas are a lot less expensive than softboxes suitable fou use with constant lights and umbrellas pose less of a fire hazard when using constant lights.

Also, as products get bigger they will need to be further from your white background. Being further away you will need to light the background separately from the product because of light fall-off (Inverse Square Law). If you don't light it separately your white background will be a shade of gray in the photo because less powerful light will reach it.

The purpose of a diffuser, softbox or other type of light modifier is to make a light source seem a lot bigger than it really is.
The bigger a light source seems to be the less harsh the light is and the more diffuse shadow edges are.

Here is a product photo I made that shows some of the things to be aware of.
I used 3, 20 x 30 pieces of what foam board under, behind, and to the left (like a wall) of the items.
I reflected light from a 3 inch wide hot shoe flash unit pointed into a 45" convertible photography umbrella. In other words, the flash unit was pointed 180° away from the items I was wanting to light.

Look at the shadows.
Notice that they have soft, diffused edges and are gray instead of being black and sharp edged.
The quality of the shadows is because my light source seemed to be 45" wide rather than just 3" wide.

But the photo has a big problem.
Light bounced off of the gold Nikon box onto the white foam board adding a golden color cast behind and to camera left. To avoid the color cast the white background needed to be quite a bit further from the gold box.
But, I also needed the background be to somewhat less than white so the white user manual would show against the background.
For that, the background is just far enough from the user manual the the light fall off has made the background slightly gray so the user manual camera right edge just berely can be seen separate from the white background.

 

[Sarahs999]

Wow. Thanks for taking the time to write all that KmH, there are some really useful things there. And thanks everyone else for recommending the book. I do see that reading a book would help and I've seen it recommended around the forum but I have a limited time frame to do this in and notice on Amazon it's 350 pages long. If I was planning to do this as a job, yes of course, but I am not a photographer. I just need some really simple straightforward recommendations to help me get the best I can, as an amateur photographer. Are there any 'beginner' level lights that would get me somewhere reasonable? I do have some photoshop skills so I'm prepared to give the pictures a helping hand.

 

[Overread]

The book itself isn't that word heavy - it has a lot of pictorial references and divides itself up very nearly into material types. Whilst its long its got all the possible materials and situations you could encounter and a few chapters plus use of the index might well save you hours of searching online coupled with waiting and hoping for answers on forums.

 

[Derrel]

Light, Science, Magic, a fabulous book. But, until you can get it, and until you actually have and own lights and light modifiers, you probably will not fully grok what it says...

Watch some of these videos by the manufacturer of a lot of lighting gear. These videos will really help you SEE good, reliable products, and how they are actually used by a skilled shooter. YouTube is filled with a lot of one-man-band videos, made and "produced" by people of varying skill levels, which can make learning the right way to do things hit or miss. The people at Photoflex have been working on these videos for years now, and they are shot from scripts, and with intelligent lesson plans underlying them. Big, big difference.

I bought my FIRST softbox from Photoflex, wayyyy back in 1987. It STILL works, and has held up! I bought two no-brand Chinese cheapies seven years ago, and both are in tatters and I have had to re-stitch and patch and jigger with them constantly.

https://www.photoflex.com/pls/category/product-still-life

 

[KmH]

I just need some really simple straightforward recommendations to help me get the best I can, as an amateur photographer.

It's not that simple because of the range of products you want to photograph.

Are there any 'beginner' level lights that would get me somewhere reasonable?

The issue is not the lights, the issue is how to use the lights and light modifiers effectively.

Frankly, it takes a fair amount of technical lighting and photography knowledge, plus photography skill to do even mediocre product photography.

 

[webrotate360]

Agreed with Derrel - watching videos with real photographers shooting similar products will bring you some reasonable results faster. Also in case you will be trying to get a pure white background on your images straight out of camera, note that the majority of product photography produced for eCommerce on the Internet was heavily post processed and looks nothing like what it was in the camera. I.e they don't try to get the pure white background straight out of camera which is not easy for various products. Same applies to some unwanted reflections, setup rigging (finishing lines, stands, etc)..

More so, most retail companies (at least in the US) who do bulk photography with hundreds of products and up and / or photo studios they subcontract would outsource background removal and other minor post processing to Asia and India. So as a long as you have consistent lighting, nicely exposed images with a good contrast between your background and your product and correct white balance (these come with some practice), you should be fine if you are willing to outsource some of the post processing.

Just don't shoot your products inside those lightboxes. They make everything look overly defused, flat and boring.