Take a Product Photography Indoor with Limited Space

a few days ago, my company got a list of new product that the owner bought (i don't know where).
then he said to me to take a picture of all of the items, which is around 82 with 1-4 variant each.

so roughly around 200+ items, i would say it was very interesting and fun, also frustrated because i just got a pile of items without names on it, so me and my colleague have to figure out which are which and belong to which category.

fortunately, i was the only designer with photography background (and have a decent camera and tripod). so as i was mentioning before, i was in responsible for taking all of the picture (without any order in particular) so i just take random stuff with random photo name (IMG_numbers.JPG) while my friend there figure out and check any items that already been photograph.

there are a lot of items to take picture of and i was happen to found this interesting item, which is a miniature or a small model version of a violin or a cello (i think its cello because the strings is the same size as the instrument.

while i was at it, i was thinking that it s nice to take a behind look at the photo shoot, so i took this picture with my phone camera. quite nice and can be very informative. there was no light set up, it's all from the office's ceiling lights.

this is the set up that i use, it was at the middle of a pathway in my office because the lighting its very nice and i don't have any space available specifically for photo shooting, the company just say to take picture anywhere you can, but at least, the provided me with a large white cloth with a bunch of papers.

i prefer to use paper rather than that cloth because i want to reduce the amount of texture in the background. i place paper in a curve state so it create a nice seamless background.

so it's always nice to have a white paper ready if you want to take a product photography and you don't have a proper space and equipment for that.

a look at the view finder, you can see what angle i was taking the picture. you could see that i have very nice soft shadow. if i increase the exposure, it's close to white.

there was around 4 light sources from the ceiling, around 45-50 degree up and front. (like this \ from the object), then there around 4 more a little bit far so in total of 8 light sources. so all of this light is base on indoor ceiling lights.

this is the original photo, which was +1 exposure, my camera setting was in iso 100, f/5, 0.8 seconds shutter.

even if its looks good on the camera LCD, i still got grey area in the photo. so i need to edit some of them, bring up the white into pure white, enhance the color and added back the string. (upper part of the string was blend in with the background, so i have to darken the string so people can see the string.)

look very nice and professional, but if you look at the set up, it was weird.
so the basic principal of photograph is light, so look around your space if there some place with even lighting, place your object there with a plain background. increase the exposure to make it easier to edit later.

in case you don't know what increase exposure mean (i should said this earlier), what you do is increase the amount of light that enter the sensor, so the image look brighter.

you can increase the time of the shutter speed or open up the aperture but since my object is small, i want to minimize the depth of field, so i stay with f/5 and increase the shutter speed. use a tripod and use timer to minimize shake and motion blur in the image.

here are other photo from different angle, maybe the object can looks nicer this way.

so that conclude my blog update and some tips that i want to share to you, hope you like it.
if you have any question, just write at the comment or email me at petkanna@gmail.com. thanks