Camera Porn How To

Product photography is a curious thing. For instance, here's a picture of a Leica M6 with a dual-range 50/2 Summicron with ugly goggles, an uglier strap, and tape all over it. Yet you still want it.



Sometimes it really is the object itself that you want, and it doesn't matter how good or bad the photo is. However in most cases, people have probably never actually touched the object, so all they have to go on are some pretty pictures and reputation/cache/speculation/marketing (cough X-Pro1). Curious.

Anyway, here's a little how-to for creating your own camera porn for the masses. It's pretty straight forward. All you need is:

• A semi-long lens (100mm+)
• A soft light source (indirect light from a large window, or a softened off-camera flash)
• A clutter-free background (any plain wall will do)
• Oh yeah, and a camera

For these shots, I used an old Nikon SB-28DX flash triggered from my 5D with a low-end Pocket Wizard. The flash fired at 1/4 power through a Westcott umbrella, which softened the light.

Initially I tried using my trusty 50/1.8 lens, but quickly discovered that this was not long enough to keep the background clutter out of the lens's perspective. I switched over to the 24-105/4 (at 105mm), which did the trick of narrowing the perspective of the background, removing unwanted junk from the scene.

I also wanted to make the object stand out, so I had to make sure that there was enough light fall-off between the object and the background, so the object would be much lighter. To do this, I had to keep the light source close to the object (about 2 feet), but far from the background (about 12 feet).

In order to kill any ambient light in the shot, I used the fastest shutter speed I could. The 5D syncs at 1/200, so all the pictures were taken at 1/200 at f/11.

For more information on general product photography, I highly recommend you go check out Strobist. And now back to our regularly scheduled camera porn...