I'm working on a good-sized wholesale order that includes web-ready photos of some of the products I'm sending (one of my customers is opening an online version of her offline shop), & just like it always ever does, being confronted with product photography after not doing it for a while sends me into an existential crisis over the state of my photo setup. I'm feeling it particularly strongly this time around, because I've been looking at so many great, artfully posed crafty photos lit with gentle natural light, which are: 1. completely gorgeous for blogs but don't always provide enough detailed clarity for a shopping site (& why should they?), & 2. completely impractical when your workspace is in a basement in Seattle, land of questionable sunlight. I know this, &, yet! Existential photography crisis!
There's actually a great tutorial for staging professional-looking photos (& then cleaning them up afterward in Photoshop) posted over at The Switchboards, but I've never been able to get the whole "diffused natural lighting" thing down, finding that "white background + glaring light from a bunch of directions + flash + photoshop" is the right recipe for me.
This works well when the thing I'm shooting is distinctly not white, but gets a little trickier when there's a color/shadow overlap between the background & the subject (see, specifically, taking pictures of my kid tees, which makes me tear my hair out). I spend a lot of time wielding my tiny PS magic wand.
So, having tried & failed a few other interesting-sounding techniques (like the paper + flash thing suggested by The Small Object -- though in going to get the link I see that I am not doing it properly, so maybe it will be a winner yet?), I thought I'd try taking a snap of my new (I couldn't help myself!) Denyse Schmidt fat quarter bundle using my standard method:
which I think is kind of funny, in a glamour shots sort of way. I'd like to get some good pictures of my quilt, which has survived the Laundry test without breaking my heart, but maybe I'll wait for some natural light to show up around here first.
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