Sunglasses on black.

With a bit of easy preparation, the right tools and some gaffer tape, any photographer can take good looking product shots in their own living room. This is a handy technique for people who wish to sell goods on eBay, as well as a good exercise for photographers who are first starting out with lights and wish to try some basic two light setups.

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To achieve the above shot, I hung a large piece of black cloth onto the wall. Using some fishing line, I suspended the sunglasses from the ceiling and had them hanging over the silver side of a 5-in-1 collapsible reflector. I mounted the camera on a tripod, chose a 70-200mm lens and shot tethered into Lightroom. The camera was at ISO200, f8 and 1/200. As mentioned (and seen in the following photo), two lights were used, both with softboxes. The upper left light was set at 1/8 power and the lower right was at 1/16.

Setup shot for sunglasses on black.

On the computer side of things, the photo had a minor blacks adjustment performed on the RAW file in Lightroom, and then was brought into Photoshop. I had to touch up some smudges on the glasses because I forgot to properly clean them before I photographed them, clone out the fishing line and added a color burn gradient layer to the lens to get it looking right. All in all, it was a pretty easy process, so give it a try some time. If you do, I’d love to see your results.

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