Excellent Product Photography

One of the most important things in photography is to make sure that your images are properly exposed. This goes for all types of photography, not just product photography. In order to achieve good exposure in your photographs, you’re going to need to think about several things.

The old method of getting proper exposure involved using a light meter. A light meter would read the light levels in the room, or place that you are in, and then tell you what aperture and shutter speed you should be using in order to get a well exposed photo. Well a light meter is still useful, but not quite as important as it used to be. You see back in the day when people were using film cameras it was very important to get your exposure correct on the first or second shot so that you wouldn’t waste much film. Well now we can use as much digital “film” as we want because we have unlimited “film” with our digital hard drives.

So to start you should probably be shooting in Av priority mode, unless you are an advanced user, in which case you’re probably not reading this guide. Using Av priority mode will allow you to set the aperture and the camera will automatically adjust the shutter speed. This gives you a guide to go by and will most likely produce decent looking images. You should then view the image on the back of your camera and see what the histogram tells you. If the lines on the histogram are bumping up against the left side, your image is going to be under-exposed, meaning it’s too dark. If the lines are bumping up against the right side, the opposite is true and your image is over-exposed. A good balance is what we are looking for. If you just can’t get what looks like a good exposure with using Av mode, then you will probably need to use M (Manual) mode and manually set the aperture and shutter speed to achieve correct exposure.

Something I haven’t mentioned yet is focus. This is rather important in product photography and so I feel that I should mention it at least once. You’ll want to make sure that the most important part of your product is in focus. To do this you can use either manual focus or automatic focus. Often times the auto focus is just as accurate and is almost always faster than manually focusing the lens. I’ll give a more in depth look into correct focus at a later date, but for right now just use auto focus and you’ll do great.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 9th, 2009 at 9:54 pm and is filed under Photography Basics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.