Hi everyone, I'm Urs Recher, hi I'm Karl Taylor and welcome to the next how to
Karl, white products, white background... always tricky!
Oh, it's tricky but you have the solution for us. Well we have a solution
and I'm working a little bit outside of my normal comfort zone because as you
and I, were both very familiar with working with studio flash, here we're
using the new broncolor LED lights and quite an interesting way of working
because we're working with continuous light and the reason I've chosen to
demonstrate these new continuous light LED products is that a lot of
photographers or new photographers, people new to it, they kind of fear
flash because flash isn't something you can see when it happens and many people
seem to want to work in a more visual way where they can just see what it
looks like continuous. What you see with your eyes is actually what
you get in the photograph later on. Exactly, and the other great benefit of
continuous lighting like this is it's also really useful for video because we
need continuous light for video. Now in this instance where for example we've
got a packshot here so it could be something for a small e-commerce company
an e-commerce little studio a lot of those type of
e-commerce companies also want to do video 360s
of their products so as well as being able to take high-quality packshots
this could be on a white turntable and they could be doing a 360 spin on a
piece of jewelry, on a cosmetic, or whatever it is... here we're just
demonstrating it as a still-life but one of the fantastic things I really like
about these broncolor LEDs is the variable color temperature... that is a big
PLUS because many continuous lighting as you know used to be tungsten based so we
we're dealing with sort of 3200 Kelvin, a warmer light and you'd have to correct
that color balance. Here, with these lights, we can set them from 2800K all the
way up to 6800K. So we can go really warm - really cold and
5600K, which we're using now is actually the same color as daylight and flash.
Just to mention one more aspect, if you have something
moving very fast and you want to make a high-speed video, this is possible as
well, because LED is flicker-free. Yeah, that's right... and now for this setup
I'm keeping it quite simple I actually think I could have done this setup with
two lights this is the 6100 softbox and actually this is a really nice size in
the horizontal format for products this size because we can allow a little bit
of backlighting around behind the product but we still got plenty at the
front and it's obviously plenty high enough to cover the height of a product
like this and then some flags. I mean people might not be familiar with
this if you're new to photography but quite simply we're shooting white on
white products and one of the problems you get with white on white as you know
is that you'll lose the edges so we've got a simple black velvet flag
here which is casting a shadow on this bottle and it also sometimes picks up a
little bit of the reflection of it sometimes depending on the surface
material and that gives us just a shadow edge down this side of the product and
what we've done here is we've raised it off the ground because we don't need the
shadow all the way down we want to make sure that the label is capturing the
light down here as well. The second softbox is smaller the 35 by
60, this is just acting as a gentle fill but the key one, or one of the important
ones is the ability to use a softbox in this case the 90 by 120 and actually use
it as your white background. A lot of times photographers are struggling
with lighting a background or white wall or white paper with one or two lights
and trying to get even illumination but one way of doing that is if your
background area isn't too large for small products like this is actually
just use the whole softbox panel and the great thing with the broncolor
softbox is the very homogenous even light spread so we can get a really
good nice pure white background. I think from the understanding it's
quite important that this is the the largest softbox in the set because
like this we can put it far away. It doesn't lose the
brightness but it has less effect on the object. A very good point very good point...
we're going back to the physics there in lighting so as you said the illumination
when it's directly into the camera it doesn't matter how far away this is the
luminosity value will be the same I mean they're minor little details for
atmospheric conditions but if the pure atmosphere ina vacuum it'll be
exactly the same, but what it would effect, if it was closer, is the light
would then start to affect the product but having it back at a distance
it's not affecting the product at all. Okay I think what I'd like to do is to
show our viewers one light at a time starting with just the pure white
background so we'll turn these two lights off, it's going to get a little
bit dark because obviously, we can't use the video lights this is one thing
that's worth pointing out as well here is that with the continuous light
setting obviously you're dealing with any light that is coming into your shot
so you do need to be working in a darkened studio or darkened area. Right
let's take our first shot, we're working with a Nikon 35mm, full-frame camera
with a 105 mm macro lens and here we can see the background light coming in
giving us value of 255 which is pure white and a nice clean pure white on the
base. These two softboxes have a white surface front they're reflecting light
back onto the product if we pulled those away it would be
pretty much a silhouette. Let's add our first light on this side, our key
light, shoot and we have now just the lighting on that side, you
could do this as a two light set and I'm going to just introduce a mirror now to
show you how we can even economize a little bit more I'm just going to go in
here and hold this in position and we'll see even a mirror, round about here,
you'll see how much extra light that brings in, there you go, so we've got a
lot of extra light coming into here just with a mirror alone and it's quite a
nice contouring as well. I think personally when I have to shoot a whole
bunch of different products I would prefer to have the softbox there because
if you have darker bottles you know you can absolutely quickly adjust it.
It works with the mirror perfectly on the white but all of a sudden you have like
a dark blue and then, of course, you're much more flexible with an active softbox.
Absolutely, with the softbox there you've got total control on how
much light you want to put in so you can go in from minimal amount of light or
you can dial it right up and like you say for darker objects, darker products,
so we're just going to turn that back on and let's take another one there please Urs.
So now we have light coming in from the softbox, so you can see it got a
little bit lighter and if we compare to no light that's no light but you'll see
we go a little bit lighter this time with it as a fill light by just having
it on a very minimal amount of power, no cut out required, we've got all pure
whites you could literally take that image and put it straight onto your catalog.
It's really ready and the beauty with this type of e-commerce
product shot is if you've got similar sort of products to shoot you can simply
take the product, replace it putting the next ones in. If you
have some variability, like you said, in color of the product then you just got
to dial these light powers up and down to go to it to match. And
the shiny part here we have shine still works. Yeah absolutely.
Great, yeah very happy with that so Karl there's one more thing I would like
to show you. If we take the softbox off...
you actually see how the light is constructed it has an external (not flash
tube) but the external light source in here right behind this matt protecting
glass there's the LED obviously but we can focus and defocus the lamp head
and we can not only use softboxes but also paras, deep umbrellas, normal
umbrellas so, of course, softboxes all kind of non reflective grids so it's
perfectly shapable LED with the same light characteristics as our flashes
Yeah, absolutely, so that protruding dome allows you
to benefit from light shapers and other modifies that flat-panel LEDs won't
For me as a creative photography one of the biggest
advantages of this LED light. Absolutely, fantastic. Well I hope you've enjoyed
that 'how-to' on e-commerce packshots and how you can also use these LED lights
for video as well. I'm Karl Taylor, I'm Urs Recher
thank you very much, Karl, was very nice. We'll see you next time.