May 18th, 2025
After the last post where I talked about my first baby steps with studio strobes, I did my first "kinda real" product test shoot, going for a bold colourful look.
I went to the shops to get some coloured paper sheets, set up my living room as my studio, and off I went trying some stuff on a morning off from my day job.
A living room turns into a studio...
The importance of research - I got what I wanted almost straight away. I've been watching videos on flash/studio photography almost daily for about 6 months now. Always learning, always getting new little pieces from here and there. Almost like talking, you start by seeing others do it. Then you imitate. And pretty soon you have a vocabulary you can draw from.
As mentioned, I wanted to go for a bold and colourful look, and as I am a bit inexperienced when it comes to retouching (I usually work in a photojournalistic manner on my landscape, stage and motorsport work), I wanted to do the heavy lifting in camera - something I find one should always strive for. My "day job" is as a musician/sound engineer, and the better something is to start (recording a guitar sound for example), the better it will be and the less work it'll take in post production.
Raw
Raw
Edited and retouched
I combined two frames, using a white "reflector" on one of them to eliminate the orange reflection on the label.
Feeling like I had this first shot in the bag, I then experimented a little bit, changing the colour of the background paper, trying complimentary colours (blue and orange for example), but I found that having the background being the same colour as the product worked much better. So I refined it a bit further.
I really like the way the background has a gradient to it.
In post, I experimented a bit with background smoothing (background replacement is still a bit above me), and then I tried my hand at expanding the image into a vertical format for use in instagram stories for example. I never really learned Photoshop, or any similar editor for that matter, so that part still needs a bit of work on my part, but I'm really happy with the results. This could easily be a paid campaign if it wasn't for my mom's products.
Granted, the background expansion didn't come out perfect in Affinity Photo, but it is still pretty nice.
Raw
Raw
Edited and retouched
I repeated the same process for something red this time.
Overall, for a morning's work I'm pretty happy with the results. If this was a real shoot, I'd probably go a lot deeper with the styling and also with the post production, but getting two or three images at this level from a random morning when I got up a bit late anyway is very satisfying. My mom is getting pro images straight away as I start building portfolio. I'm enjoying using the strobes and shooting in a studio setting a lot, and I really want to do this as often as I can.
Now hire me, please... 😅
Miguel