Help! Murder! Polis!...

...as people in Glasgow are fond of saying in a crises.

I've spent the day in the studio doing product shots for the loudspeaker manufacturer Tannoy.

Possibly one of the most challenging things I've ever done. Can you imagine how many shades of black there are in one cabinet that also has very very shiny black, satin black and matt black?

Two of the cabinets were so big two people struggled to move them. Oh, and they had to be photographed from below because they are suspended.

No matter how fastidious I was cleaning them with lint free cloths and so on there are still specks of dust to be removed in PP.

hmmm - entry for the fortnightly comp ?

Sounds like you might have a candidate for the new fortnightly comp

Great minds

Snap!

Or is it a case of fools seldom differ

too late to help you now, but the battle of the dust is one we've all faced.
I use three things..
I duct tape large furnace filters to those big square fans and set them up to pull air through the filter and blow air onto the subject to prevent dust from settling.
I also run a humidifier before shooting...
last but not least on some items you can tape a wire to the object and ground it on a faucet to reduce static electricity from attracting dust.

I had a shoot recently for a magazine, the set was in the middle of a big shipping and receiving warehouse...
dust everywhere..
"I'm gonna shoot this low key" was my first remark "So we can hide as much dust in shadows as possible.."

Sadly there is client confidentiality, these things aren't on the market yet

Thanks for that, part of the problem was that two of them were prototypes that had had a lot of handling. The ones that were straight off the factory line were problem free. TBH for web use the dust isn't going to be a problem but if their designer looks at the pics at 100% then comments might be made which, with a new client, I don't want.

there was an old darkroom technique... adding diffusion between the enlarger and the paper caused the shadows to bleed into the highlights....
you could try this:
on a new layer apply a heavy gaussian blur, desaturate color, then set blend mode to "Softlight" and lower the opacity a touch... a lot of dust will blend away, but you'll need to do some masking or erasing in some lighter areas...

this should let your shadows bleed over the dust... at least in the darker areas..

Glad to see Tannoy are still in business.
I helped with a lot of Tannoy installation work, back in the late fifties, early sixties when I started work as an electrical engineering apprentice. A long time ago, those were the days.
If I can remember correctly, back then, all their cabinets were a sort of a dull brown hammer finish, no problem with reflections or dust specks then.


Chris R

Take a look here, things have changed a lot! link

Thanks for that link, Ken.

All flashy, equipment know, fifty plus years of progress .
But it is really good to see a company still in business, after all this time. Power to there elbow.

Chris R

I forgot to mention that I used the DA 35mm f2.8 exclusively, everything on 'X' mode at around f8 - stunning performance from the lens.

I was told that there was a drinking game based on murder/polis. If you were in the pub and Taggart was on the TV, every time someone said murrrderrr you would down a whisky and every time someone said polis you would down a pint. As you would imagine, that would be a quick way to get drunk