Table Top Studio

 This morning's practical meeting introduced you to a table top studio set up for taking images of jewellery, products or still life.  The set up I used at home where I have more space as I am not trying to get 2 set ups in the same window space is illustrated here.

I have used a roll of specialist vinyl photographic background material as it gives a nice infinity curve with the background and floor merging into one leaving your image hanging in space.  You can use any coloured material, scarves, tin foil, photo mount, coloured paper and it does not matter if you have an edge between floor and background.

With a bit more space than we had in the village hall this morning you can experiment by varying the camera to subject and subject to background distances.  You want to control your image by the relative amount of light hitting the background and your subject.  With a light/white background you want to illuminate the background to the point of just starting to over expose.  Conversely with a dark/black background you want to under expose the background.

I showed those of you using mobile devices how to select the point of focus and adjust the exposure up and down to change the effect on the background.  I also suggested you shoot in a square format to introduce a bit of variability in your composition and because it suits most still life subjects.

I chose to use side lighting from the window to illuminate the subject; you can modify the light using a diffuser (e.g. net curtain or similar) over the window (to soften/reduce it) and/or a reflector (silver foil wrapped around a table mat) to bounce light back into the shadows.

You can tilt the background to/from the light to control how much light hits the background.

In this image the light was coming from the window on the right with a reflector bouncing the light back into the cup.  Note the small catchlight in the cup.  The camera remained parallel with the window so the reflected light did not bounce back to the camera.

I under exposed by 1.5 stops to darken the background and then adjusted it in Lightroom classic to darken it some more and recover the colours in the cup.

This second image was taken with a white background but appears grey because the camera was fooled by the transparency of the glass.  Positive exposure compensation whitens the background but also makes the glass less distinct.

I used flash as the light had fallen by the time I took this image.  This resulted in a shadow on the background which, combined with the transparency of the glass made it very difficult to isolate the subject in post production in order to whiten the background. I converted it to monochrome as it lessens the impact of the grey background and gives a pleasing image.

Over exposing the white background was more successful in the next image taken earlier in the day with a darker subject.

This image was adjusted in Lightroom to fully blow the highlights to pure white so the image pops out from its background.

This final image was taken with the same set up as the cup above but without a reflector.  Light was coming from the right.  Over exposed by 2 stops and the image recovered in Lightroom classic.  

Over to you, this month's task it to use these techniques to produce jewellery/Product/Still Life Images.