leather products - lighting problems

Thank you all for the great advice! I've done the best I could for this
shoot with the equipment that I have at the moment, and the customer is
happy. Your comments will help me with future work, and they give me
some idea of what equipment I'm going to need to make things work
better in the future.
--
Petros
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On Friday 08 October 2004 01:32, Petros wrote:

Stefan Patric posted:
On Thursday 07 October 2004 03:01, Petros wrote:

I'm doing some photos of wallets and purses that primarily will
be viewed in an online catalog, but may also be used in print.
The lighter colored leather seems to coming out OK, but the brown
and black leather is coming out like a solid dark blotch. Is
there some trick to lighting this that won't cause tons of glare
off of the leather while bringing out the leather itself? you can
take a look here

http://petros.pl/Galleries/Sagan/index.html

You've got a good, overall, general lighting set up. Now all you
need to add is additional illumination from the extreme sides of
the wallets and purses (They are called "kickers.") either by using
small, narrowly focused lights or small white or silver reflectors
to skim across the surface to delineate the texture of the leather
and highlight the edges.

You will probably still need to digitally retouch the images some
in post to get the most out of the shots, but there should be no
need to adjust contrast, white point, black point, etc., if you've
lit the subject properly.

Thank you for the ideas. I'll try to see if I can get a hold of some
more lights. If you saw the way I lit this, you'd laugh I only
have the shoe mounted flash (EF-500 DG Super), so I had to get
creative with reflecting my light. I hung a cork bulletin board over
my workspace and from the left side I hung a large piece of white
paper. I set up a couple of pieces of A3 paper to the right to
reflect back onto the wallets. I aimed the flash up towards the
joint between the cork board and paper with the flash's diffuser.
The cork color warmed the overall tone enough to be pleasing, so I
didn't cover the cork with paper. At that point it was just a
question of experimenting with exposure times.

Before getting more lights, see if small (not much bigger than the
product) silver or white reflectors will do the job. And, consider
this: photographers lit still lifes and products with hot lights
long before electronic flash was available. Usually, when learning
to light products and small sets, it is better to use hot lights than
strobes. With hot lights you can see what the lighting effects are
better than with strobes, even if they have modeling lights.

Remember, it's not how much you've got that's important, it's what you
can do with what you have.

--
Stefan Patric

Build a tent....flash from outside the tent. They make a spray that matts a
finish....if it doesn't harm the leather it might be a good idea. Look into
Grey Component Removal...GCR. Browns are nasty as they have lots of all the
CMYK....so lessen the CMY and replace with K for a cleaner print.

Gene Palmiter posted:
Build a tent....flash from outside the tent. They make a spray that matts a
finish....if it doesn't harm the leather it might be a good idea. Look into
Grey Component Removal...GCR. Browns are nasty as they have lots of all the
CMYK....so lessen the CMY and replace with K for a cleaner print.

Thanks Gene. I finished this some time ago and the client was very
happy. I won't be doing the seps for it, so I have no idea what profile
they'll use, but I'll remember for my own work. I'll also look into
building myself a tent. Good advice!

--
Petros
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