In a previous post I expoused the benefits of keeping things simple when lighting a product shot. One or two speedlights pointed at the ceiling give a large, soft and even light from above - ideal when you don't have a softbox. Today I wanted to a take a picture of a wooden box that I recently inherited. So naturally I started with something simple.
Here is the result with just the ceiling bounced light. As you can see it is even, soft lighting but the top of the box is too light. Armed with the knowledge learnt from Light Science and Magic I spotted that this was because the varnished surface was reflecting an image (specular reflection - mirror light reflections) of the wall/ceiling. The fix is to hold a black card in the family of angles that the box is reflecting.
This helped a lot and now we have a really nice simple shot of the box - achieved in minutes.
I decided I'd like to see if I couldn't spice the shot up slightly. I wanted to make slightly more of a feature of the design on the top if I could so I put a gridded flash on a tripod to the right of the box and aimed it at the top.
This just adds a bit more punch to the top which I liked. By this point it was getting late and I should have been in bed but I decided to try just one more thing. I gelled the gridded light with a CTO gel. This warmed the light which really brought out the tones in the wood.
Unfortunately this also gave me a hard shadow to the left of the box which I didn't want. Rather than solve the problem I tried to fill the shadow with another bounced flash which didn't really do enough. By this point it was far too late so I gave in.
So was the experiment a success? Sort of, I managed to get the simple, "safe" shot really quickly and then built on this with some extras that did improve the picture. But by the end I wasn't fully in control of the light and was left with a shadow I didn't want. Something to learn from for next time I guess.
Here is the setup:
And here is the postprocessing in lightroom (same for all shots):
