product photography lighting -- help

Dear Chaps

To shoot product like lenses at home,

do you use continuous lighting or flash?
do you use shooting table or tent?
is there any set-up to recommend like brand, type and so on?

Thanks!

I use off-camera flash with diffuser x 2 or 3 and a light tent.

All you need is 2 or 3 small flashes (any make), desktop tripods, radio triggers (cactus 5 or similar), and a light tent of a suitable size.

I just use a large window and a table top for my eBay images - it gives them a nice, natural, homely look. K20D with 18-55mm lens is also more than fine for the purpose.

Thank you for the info! A large window is still a sole light source which can cause shadow? Am I right?

Thank you for that! I will give it a try later. I just feel continuous lighting is easier, and always not confident about flash...

Shadows add modelling, if you want to reduce them a reflector can throw some of the light back. For most purposes, a large enough window is enough, it's a brilliant, enormous softbox.

Then how about background? just A4 or A3 white paper or won't bother?

You could use A3 paper, but I quite like the wood effect background.

Had a try with A4 paper and no special lighting... It seems not bad.

Setup

A good result, and one that shows how much cleaning needs to be done to make your product look its best.

The detail in your shots above reveal that you didn't do much cleaning prior to the shoot.

Yes, you were right. It was getting so obvious with close-up shot.

I've just been trying out a 40cm light cube similar to this one link but I used two flashguns with diffusers and a LED torch for manual focusing. Very easy to use and f/11 to f/16 at 100ISO is possible.

I set it up on a table and used light stands to hold the flashguns which were triggered by IR from the camera.

K-5 + Pentax 24-90mm zoom




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I tried that but thought the blue was far too vivid. It overwhelms the subject and it's the subject we want people to be looking at.

The one on ebay has 4 different colors: Black, White Red and Blue.

Mine has grey, blue and black, but it's only held by a velcro strip
so any material could be used even Colorama paper.

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You left room completely dark?

No the room was normal tungsten lighting approx. 3000k
which isn't spot on for focusing.

The torch was about 5200k which is OK for focusing and
showed the correct colours in LV because the camera was
set to Daylight WB.

Because f/11 is possible focusing isn't too critical and I
used an Eye-Fi Card to see the results straight away.

The torch was a Coast HP7 on flood. I might try that on it's
own light painting the outside of the tent.