Trying to create good content is hard. But if everyone could do it, then everyone would, and it would be very difficult to be special and to be able to separate your value from everyone else in the market.
This past weekend I crammed 3 photo/video shoots over Saturday-Sunday and invested in rental equipment for the first time. I rented a Laowa 24mm Probe Lens & a Nila Boxer Daylight 200w. That following Monday after felt like my body was recovering from marathon. It was a lot of work but I’m grateful to be in these positions of discomfort and necessary effort. I learned a lot from the shoot day’s themselves, but now comes that necessary wonderful & dreadful part of the content creating process: post-production & editing.
Here’s how the first shoot went:
Saturday - 10.17.20: Macro Product Photography
At about 9am I met up with my long-time collaborator and good friend Andrew, who, together with his wife Sharon, own and operate @andrewgstudios , a fashion/apparel design business that currently specializes in leather work. As the two have been getting ready to launch their new website, they’ve been coordinating their product photography with me for their new belt line release. Andrew told me that he want’s their product pages to be close-up; the leather material of the belts filling the entire frame. Knowing I was already renting the probe lens for another shoot this coming weekend, we decided that it would be a good opportunity to use it for their products.
What I Did
EQUIPMENT: I used my Canon 5dmkiii (handheld), & the Laowa 24mm Probe Lens. I shot at 1/160, ISO 400
SETUP: The belts were placed on top of a beige leather hide that they already had, which was rolled out on top of a long outdoor patio table.
LIGHTING: The Laowa Probe 24mm lens shoots at f/14; so I need a lot of light to compensate. (I didn’t use the built in LED ring) To go for a natural vibe that complements the leather’s authenticity, we shot outdoors in their backyard @10am-11am daylight, with no diffusion. The ambient light was composed of direct overhead daylight that bounced off a lot of grass-greenery of the backyard, as well as other suburban backyard elements— all of which bounced into the exterior walls, ceiling, and concrete floor of the backyard patio’s built-in canopy.
STYLE GUIDE: We didn’t really go over a Style Guide as we weren’t entirely certain how the Macro Photography would look. The main focus was to fill the frame with texture of the belt.
What I Learned
THE MAIN PROBLEM: Andrew wanted as much as possible in focus, which I couldn’t do when shooting at an angle with a macro lens, working towards the finer textures.
How I should have done the SETUP: I should always bring my laptop in so the client could see the photo’s better as I take them. The DSLR lcd screen is small, and although Andrew could see my photo’s, I’m sure it was hard to tell (especially during the day) how much these macro-lens images were not in focus. It’s best to bring a setup that allows me to pull the images unto a larger screen, and get confirmation on the shot’s quality. Then use the initial test photo’s to build a Style Guide at the beginning, so ideas can be pulled around the web design, and then simply follow the parameters of the Style Guide then be free to flow any new idea’s/iterations from there.
It also would have been wise to shoot direct-overhead with my camera mounted on a c-stand or a safely-rigged tripod, and got top-down shots, directly vertical so that I could maintain more of the image in focus. Shooting an angle, the surface area wasn’t at an ‘even-lay’ facing the lens, which made maintaining a largely focused surface area impossible.
How I should have done the LIGHTING: In order to accommodate that ‘hindsight-setup’; I should’ve used that Nila Boxer LED light that I was renting, and diffused it with muslin on another c-stand. This would create a more even light, and would kill any shadow’s from an overhead setup had I done so. It also would have helped to eliminate some of the green hues in the ambient light that was getting carried from the backyard’s greenery. I was able to balance it out with a slight purple tint in post—but it’s better to just handle it all in-camera on the day.
REFLECTIONS: I didn’t realize that I’d also gotten reflections in the metal detail of the belt. Another thing I could have possibly avoided with a direct overhead setup with the Nila Boxer LED added to fill in shadows
ALWAYS MAKE A STYLE GUIDE!: I once worked at a department store portrait studio where we always relied on an expressions sheet to make sure we got all our basic poses down before trying anything creative. This made it so we could turnaround clients on an average of 15 minutes. I should have done the same for this at the outset; built an idea around initial test photo’s after confirmation on a bigger screen alongside the client; then repeated iterations for quality assurance. I essentially just figured it out as I moved forward, trying to make sure I had repeat angles and placements for every product. Inevitably some have slight differences, and that’s not a risk worth taking. Get what you need first, then risk creatively afterwards.
you can see the laowa probe lens here, center-frame
All said and done, there are still good shot’s there that Andrew did use for Instagram, which is nice. It was also the first time I got to do any sort of Macro Photography, and the first time I rented and used the Probe Lens. We’ve already scheduled a reshoot to get something closer to what their brand website is looking to style with, and it’s on-the-house as it was my fault on not thinking to have a better setup on the outset, and making sure my client could see the details of the image better as I was taking them to start. I gotta bring that laptop to every shoot, because you never know. Also,
it’s better to have a bit of a slow start, than to move quickly into a bad final product.
I did use the Probe Lens again the last shoot I had on Sunday night, when I got detail-pickup shot’s for a Tattoo-Artistry Promotional Video. The lens was literally right on the client’s skin beside the needle as my friend Josh tattooed a couple getting matching tattoo’s! The shots looked incredible though once we figured out how close I could get and we warmed into it, but it was still very nerve-wracking.
More details on that when I get to that blog-post. Until then,
thank you for reading!