Power Drill - An experiment in lighting of a high contrast object

[FocusTester]

I took this image with a Canon 6d and a 100/2.8L, ISO 100 f/11 at 1/8 on a tripod.



Both the focus and lighting were pretty difficult to get right, but I think it turned out well. What do you guys think?

Update, here is my second attempt based on the advice I got:



Now the image should be less flat and the background less distracting. I managed to get some dust in the shot under the drill, so try to ignore that for the sake of discussion. What do you guys think of the lighting and other aspects this time?

 

[fokker]

How was it hard to get the focus right?

 

[Derrel]

The bright, patterned background is "stealing from" the drill, which has very flat light on it, and no highlights on the product (except the slight highlight on the base of the drill) to show any shape or dimension on the drill. A MUCH darker background would have worked better with this flat lighting on the drill. The striping of the background curtain is a very LARGE area, physically, whereas the drill is small, and flat lighted. It's not a really horrible shot, but it's also not a great shot. The background is soooooo large, and the drill is very small, so comparison, the white advances, and the darker-toned drill just recedes. If the background had been MUCH darker, the yellow drill would have stood out much more, even with the flat lighting on the drill. It is sharp, and focused, but the background's also focused well enough, and lighted enough, that it competes for visual attention.

Even blowing the backdrop out to PURE white would put more emphasis on the drill. I think photos like this are very difficult to do without a lot of training.

Here's a comparison of a similar Dewalt drill. DeWalt® - Cordless Drill/Drivers ? Your Way, Today, Guaranteed!

 

[FocusTester]

How was it hard to get the focus right?

I know it sounds crazy, but I had to bracket the aperture to get good focus at the near/far edges of it at the "pixel peeper" level. I wanted f/8, I got stuck with f/11. Maybe it's just my inexperience, but this wasn't the hard part.

The hard part was focusing on the exact center of it. What you may not be able to even see from this image is the teeny tiny notch under the trigger. That was my (manual) focus point. The focus wheel on the 100/2.8L wasn't accurate enough and since I don't have a rail I had to nudge the tripod quite a bit to get it in perfect focus. I used the center, because at this distance, the 1/3 in front / 2/3 in back depth of field rule is more like 50/50. This was what I meant by focus difficulty.

 

[Braineack]

The lighting is boring, it's way too flat on the subject. It needs soft shadows to give it depth -- it's hard to tell the handle even has a rounded edge to it.

 

[FocusTester]

The lighting is boring, it's way too flat on the subject. It needs soft shadows to give it depth -- it's hard to tell the handle even has a rounded edge to it.

Excellent point! I should have turned it 180 degrees so that there is more light on the black part of the handle and perhaps less on the yellow part, where you can really see depth.

 

[FocusTester]

The bright, patterned background is "stealing from" the drill, which has very flat light on it, and no highlights on the product (except the slight highlight on the base of the drill) to show any shape or dimension on the drill. A MUCH darker background would have worked better with this flat lighting on the drill. The striping of the background curtain is a very LARGE area, physically, whereas the drill is small, and flat lighted. It's not a really horrible shot, but it's also not a great shot. The background is soooooo large, and the drill is very small, so comparison, the white advances, and the darker-toned drill just recedes. If the background had been MUCH darker, the yellow drill would have stood out much more, even with the flat lighting on the drill. It is sharp, and focused, but the background's also focused well enough, and lighted enough, that it competes for visual attention.

Even blowing the backdrop out to PURE white would put more emphasis on the drill. I think photos like this are very difficult to do without a lot of training.

Here's a comparison of a similar Dewalt drill. DeWalt® - Cordless Drill/Drivers ? Your Way, Today, Guaranteed!

I was hoping that the bright background would help to add contrast to the dark parts of the drill, but apparently it worked against me in this case. One of the reasons as already mentioned was that the background was relatively sharp, because it wasn't far enough from the drill and the aperture was half-closed (f/11) in order to: (1) get all parts of the drill in focus, (2) get the highest level of detail afforded by the lens employed (100/2.8L) and (3) not fall prone to resolution loss due to diffraction on the full-frame body used. In summary, a pixel peeper's nightmare. I find it to be an interesting shot showing the wear to the drill from over a decade of infrequent use, I just need to figure out how to get it to look less flat and yet still be relatively well lit to show detail in its highlights and shadows.

Thanks for the detailed analysis!