Nath-Sakura - Product Photography: Lighting, Composition, and Shooting Techniques

Photographing objects always seems like a very easy thing to do until you start trying to do it, and then it can quickly turn into a nightmare if you underestimate how important it is to take the time to learn the basic concepts that govern light and the specific reflecting properties of each kind of material.

What could be more ordinary than a pair of glasses or a bottle of wine? And yet, photographing these objects can turn out to be a difficult task for anyone trying to light them and create a pleasant representation of them without a solid technical background.

It is impossible to figure out how many sources of light to use, how to position them, and how they work without first understanding Snells law of refraction, the notion of families of angles on spherical surfaces, the management of direct and diffuse reflections, the difference between the reflections from glass and from metal, how to manage the intensity of light using a flash meter or exposure meter, and a host of other optic phenomena.

Whatever camera you might be using, whether it is an analog camera made in the 1950s or one of the most modern and high-tech medium-format digital devices, in the final rendering of a photograph, everything depends on lighting, whose rules are as old as the physics of light (in other words, optics).

This book is not the kind of recipe book for photography that you will find flooding the market. Instead, it is meant to teach you the principles of light, and of lighting objects, in depth. Because even if you have read a book that goes into detail about how to illuminate a bottle of red wine, if you dont fully understand the laws governing the lighting of cylinders and the laws of reflection, its a safe bet that it will take you a long time to figure out how to light the silk-screening or the gilded embossing on the label, with all the reflections in the right places; or worse, that you will find yourself at a total loss when you are faced with a bottle of ros or whiskey.

It is better to take the time to grasp all of the principles that govern light, to deepen your comprehension of the phenomena that occur when light encounters matter, and to understand how you are going to be able to photograph an object, rather than embarking on making photographs that are doomed to fail because of a lack of knowledge of the issues that come into play.

I know how daunting this can seem to the amateur photographer, but I assure you that you will not be disappointed: by understanding what happens when you move your light source, why a reflection appears in an unexpected place, or why it continues to appear even when you have lowered the intensity of the light, you will understand a multitude of concepts that will be valid in all other photographic realms as well, from portraits to landscapes.

In this book, I have tried to establish a system of categories that will make it possible to cover product photography in its entirety: by reducing all the variables to questions of the condition of the surface, geometric forms, and reflectivity, we can apply the concepts we learn here to every class of objects, and thus determine the ideal kind and angle of lighting for photographing them.

Whether youre photographing a matte opaque plastic cylindrical object, such as a supplement bottle, or a clear glass trapezoidal object, like a perfume bottle, or an object made of mixed materials such as chrome, glass, and rubber, like a car, you will learn how to manage the appropriate lighting and perspective on all possible objects.