Pro product shots

James Paterson shows how to shoot high-end product photography on a budget using a combination of simple lighting and Photoshop skills

product photography is about making an object look its absolute best – through lighting, arrangement and postproduction skills. As such it’s an exercise in perfection, and misplaced reflections or dodgy shadows are unacceptable flaws. Perfection can be a challenge, but it can also be very lucrative – product photography is among the best paid jobs in the industry.

Whether you want to get into paid product work, or if you simply fancy flogging a few items on ebay, good product photo skills can be a real benefit. In this project, we’ll look at a setup for shooting a perfume bottle – a killer combination of glass and reflective metal make this one of the trickiest of subjects, but we can master the challenge with a few tricks of our own.

We’ll use a basic home studio flash kit to light our product. These typically come with two heads, which gives us the flexibility to light the backdrop with one head and the product with the other. It can be very tricky to nail everything in one perfect frame. Thankfully, in a controlled setup like this with a fixed camera we have the freedom to build up our lighting over several frames, by moving the front light into different positions, or using a reflector to bounce it across our subject.

Once we’ve captured the frames we need we can piece the best bits together in Photoshop using simple compositing skills.