Product Photos and Light Painting

[madFive]

Doing a preemptive move here from the gun forum so we can dig a little deeper and get some good advice from the people here (and show off product photos and light-painting projects).

GLSauron has a sweet-looking 10/22, but it doesn’t fit in his light-box. I suggested just using a large sheet of white paper for background, and doing light-painting to achieve a good product-photo look for this larger object.

Grr. Damn rifles are too long for a lightbox. Need to work on technique for them.

My solution to this has been to use a large roll of white paper (think you can get this from like a packing supply place) to lay out a seamless background, use another large piece of white paper for reflector on one side, put camera on tripod in dark room and use bulb mode. You can pop the flash as many times as you want from different angles to get lots of nice hard light and soft reflected light across the subject. You can also throw a gel over the flash and paint in some color which looks very cool.

You got all the time in the world to build your light when you're shooting a static subject. Here's a couple I've done with this method.

I don’t have a separate flash yet.

Oh. That shouldn't really be a problem, as long as you have a little time to experiment with workaround. Just use whatever light you normally use with the light-box. A lamp or flashlight will work just fine - and you can use any piece of translucent material as a diffuser. This just makes it a little more difficult to get the white-balance right, but it's not a big deal. As long as you have a camera with bulb mode or that can leave the shutter open for several seconds this will still work. Just set the aperture fairly small, leave the shutter open and wave the light around 'till you get all you need.

And just so I don't derail the thread too much more, here's the other one I did with my white paper-roll instead of light-box. I couldn't get the angle right with my normal table-top setup, so I ended up taping the paper up on my garage wall and propping the gun up on the wall to get the flat profile angle. (Then rotated in PP and edited out the shadow under the stock and barrel-tip.)

Camera is a rebel XSi, so that part isn't a problem. Actually I like that Idea. I'll have to try it.
How do you avoid getting hotspots and such?

There, now we’re all caught up…

The key to most light-painting images is a lot of trial and error. Takes a few tries to get the camera settings right, and then several more tries on your “lighting performance” to get the look you want. As far as “hot-spots” go, you can use a larger diffuser to spread your light out (something like a white shower-curtain works really well for this); but if done right the sharp specular highlights you get from good hard light can add a lot of definition and sharpness to your photos, so I’d recommend using a mix of hard and soft light when possible.

So - anyone else here tried this technique or something similar? When you're shooting a static object from a tripod you can make a little light go a very long way.