Today we’re going to look at a simple lighting setup that you can easily do at home to add a professional look to your still life shots, eBay ads, product photos and anything else you can think of. I’ve used the vegetables I just bought at the market for this, but the principles will be the same for anything you care to substitute.
Setting up for this shot was quick and easy. I came back from the market with a bag full of vegetables and basically dumped them onto a piece of white seamless. To the left, I placed a flash on a lightstand pointing into a bounce umbrella. A couple of test shots showed too much shadow on the right, so I placed a sheet of white cardboard on the right to act as a reflector to throw a little light back into the shadows. I didn’t want to completely eliminate the shadow – if I did, I could have placed another light there, or moved my camera left light to a more overhead position.
Here’s the lighting setup. The diagram is from www.kevinkertz.com who makes a lighting diagram file available for sharing of setups. It’s a layered PSD file and you can move things around until it shows the lighting setup you need.
As long as you have some means of getting the flash off-camera, all you really need is an umbrella and you can replicate this. I used a bounce umbrella but you could just as easily use a shoot-through. In fact, I normally use shoot-throughs when I incorporate umbrellas – the umbrella I used can be used as both a bounce and a shoot-through. The only reason I chose to bounce was because I was too lazy to remove the black/silver backing from the umbrella. For my Taiwan readers, convertible umbrellas are available at Keystone for under NT$1000 – I think I paid $700 (US$20) and lightstands for a similar price. And that’s really all you need, moneywise. You could even get away without using an umbrella and shoot through a white bedsheet or shower curtain. For a reflector, I used a sheet of cardboard and you could use the same as a background as well in place of the white seamless. I had an Elinchrom Skyport as my flash trigger – for those wanting to do things cheaper, there are a variety of very cheap RF triggers, affectionately known as Poverty Wizards, available for US$20 or so on eBay, and as a bonus for those in Taiwan, these triggers are available in most camera stores for a few hundred NT$. You could also use PC cords or TTL cords.
For these shots, I set my camera and flash to manual. I used the Canon EOS 5D Mark II with a 50mm f1.8 lens and 550ex speedlight triggered by the Elinchrom Skyport. The flash was set at 1/8 power, and the camera was ISO200, f5.6 and a 1/200 shutter speed.
As usual, any comments or discussion is welcome.
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Craig Ferguson Images | Cultural Photography. One of the key aspects of life that we humans identify with is culture. We label people, places and events according to our ideas of what they are, ranging from the broader scale defined by tradition and place down to the small scale subcultures and tribes. Craig Ferguson Images is consistantly creating new visions in the field of cultural photography. From traditional festives and customs to modern, urban subcultures, Craig Ferguson Images is in touch with the changing world. From our base in Taipei, Taiwan we are perfectly positioned at the crossroads of the ancient and the modern.
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