Electrical Product Shoot Tutorial

The image that didn't make it!

Upon completion of the process below, the design of the product had changed, rendering this image obsolete. That's something that you have to accept when working on new projects and why you have to remain flexible and positive with clients. Rather than simply archiving the image, I thought it might be useful to share the process and create a little tutorial. Waste not want not..... 

I was recently approach to produce a series of technical specification sheets. These were to be used to present to potential buyers as part of sales pitches. This was very much about capturing the the actual product itself, clearly and simply. This differs from the marketing shots you would see in advertising billboards or magazines and works more along the lines of standard, 'stock' photography - a clean white background with the product correctly exposed with as clear, sharp detail as possible. The lighting setup I went with for the series of images is below:

The setup was 3x studio strobes. A softbox was added to the strobe on the far right to provide a brand and soft light. The strobe to the left of the product was the key light and was modified with a honeycomb grid and barn-doors. This was so I control direct light on the product. The strobe on the left just had a standard reflector and was used to ensure the background was pure white and remove any shadows. It would also, bounce the light off the background giving some separation on the subject. The camera was set on a tripod in portrait format and locked into position as I would be taking a series of images to create the final shot. Camera settings were ISO100 @ F13 1/160s. This produced the image below:

 Not the most inspirational image I've ever taken but it's what was required. So that was the firs part done. Behind the mesh fascia on this product, there is a series of brightly coloured LED's that synchronise with the music that it plays out. So, how do I reproduce the lights and still retain a hi-key look. The problem here is that when you're firing about 1000 watts of light at the product, the low power of the LED's are completely washed out. I switched my remote strobe trigger off and left only the modelling lights on the two strobes pointing at the product.  This left the product only lit by two modelling lights but the image wasn't popping enough colour from the LED's. So, I switched off all light sources, I changed the camera settings to F2.2 and 0.8 seconds shutter speed. Why such a long shutter speed? The reason is that the LED's, when activated were a little unpredictable and faster shutter speed only produced a small amount of light details. I took a series of images and the one I settled on is the one below:

So, now I have an image that is correctly exposed for the unit and one which shows the LED's. I need to combine these shots to create the final image. I imported both images into Photoshop and stacked the LED image on top of the correctly exposed one. I then applied an layer mask to the LED image and painted with a soft edge brush to reveal only the vibrant LED's. I chose to mask the image and use soft-edge brush rather than creating a selection as it gave a much more evenly graduated transition on the edge of the LED image against the harsh hi-key image on the layer below it. It didn't need to be accurate, it was more important that it looked believable. The final image is below:

It was at this point the client emailed to say 'We've changed the design, we'll get a sample sent over you and also, the other product which is in black needs to be pink. Can you do that ?'...... 'Yes, of course', I said.