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In part 2 of this article we get more in-depth in controlling your lighting

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Controlling the light part 2

In the first part of this article we looked at some of the fundamentals of taking controlling of lighting for catalogue shooting, and while this article is aimed at shooting of small to medium sized products, many of the pointers here will stand you in good stead for other lighting applications too.

So, without further ado, here's part 2...

Taking control of the lighting.

Here are some in-depth pointers that will help you take control of the lighting.

• Shoot in a blacked-out room/garage/basement/etc.
  If you have access to a spare room that can be blacked out, you should start by putting heavy, dark blankets over your windows, or purchase rolls of flexible black, plastic, or sheets of black cardboard from your nearest stationer.
• If you don't have a room that can be blacked out...
  Shoot at night. Duh.
  
• If you don't have a room that can be blacked out (part 2)...
  Ok seriously, build a box to work in, and drape it with material that will help you block out stray light.
  I use a white box consisting of rhino board that I painted with good old-fashioned white enamel paint on all the inner surfaces, and for a surface to shoot on I use a sheet of thick, white perspex. The perspex is highly polished and it gives me great reflection effects when I want it. Plus (this is where you'd better still be following me from part I, earlier), it acts as my reference point for white balance adjustment.
  I don't "black out" my box, as such. Instead I drape it with thick white sheeting. (Be sure to have enough white material of exactly the same texture and colour to cater for all your draping needs) That way I have a true lightbox through which I can shine my lights, and can also ensure that any reflections on the product being shot stay uniformly white (or the requisite uniform shade of white - depending on the exact colour of your light-bulbs and drape material).
  Tip - keep plenty of clothes pegs handy for securing your draping material, tying down electric cabling and any other needs that might pop up on set. A roll of duct tape should also be one of your number one checklist items before setting up for any shoot. You'll thank me for this later - I promise!
  A black box works for things like silver jewellery where you want to work with black reflections, and thereby emphasise the piece. Just take note of the fact that placing  lights in a black box gets tricky, because your lighting rigs can show up reflected in your product. How to work with a black box will be covered in another article on another day...

• Use only one kind of light-bulb.
  This may seem like a no-brainer point, but in my early days I experimented with all sorts of bulbs to find the one that would give me the right "temperature" of white. (colour is measured in temperature Kelvin - Warm white contains shades of yellow, while Cold white contains shades of blue) I mixed my light bulbs when I first started out doing product photography and would sometimes end up with blue-white light on the back-end of the subject, and yellow-white light on the front, and no amount of white balance adjustment could help me get the pure white I was searching for. Fortunately some skillful Photoshop manipulation saw me through the crisis, but with much sweat and more than just a little sotto-voice cursing I learned the hard way to not mix my light sources.
  You have been warned!

• Keep those old tripods and microphone stands handy.
  You need lighting to accentuate the shape and form of the product being shot, back-lighting to over-expose your infinity curve, side-lighting to pick up highlights, etc, etc, and these lights need to be held in place, preferably not by being held in your left hand, balanced on the big toe of your right foot, and being draped around your neck, all while you're looking through your viewfinder and using your nose to hit the shutter button.
• What's an infinity curve?
  In short, an infinity curve is any bent surface at the back of your studio, lightbox, shooting area that gives the illusion of there being no horizon behind your subject. This subject will enjoy more attention some other time...
• Shadowless Photography
  This is, surprisingly, one of the easiest things to do. In the old days people used lightboxes to view contact sheets of slides or negatives. Those same lightboxes can throw light on the bottom end of a subject. 1+1=2, right?
  Put your subject on a piece of white perspex, or a piece of glass with a white covering over it - in fact, on any surface that can act as a diffuser to "scatter" the directed light coming from beneath. For an improvement on this idea, use long fluorescent tubes as your lower light source and help yourself around the spot light effect.

I was able to use this glass table on the client's premises for an improvised lightbox, with some spots directing a whole bunch of light up from where I had them taped down to a dustbin, below.

With any luck you should now be well equipped to tackle some of the practical lighting issues that could face you in your first product shooting gig.
With tips and hints such as these I've shared with you, plus some lessons of my own learned along the way, I've figured out how to improvise lighting systems for a mere fraction of the price that professional rigs sell for, and am able to solve on-site challenges using the techniques and the materials listed in this article.
Now, I'm not going to go into working with RAW files and White balance manipulation in this article, so you'll need to spend some time getting to know more about that on your own for now, at least until if I've tied myself down for long enough to write about it.
In the meantime I'd love to hear about your learning experiences, and I'd especially love to know if this article was of any use to you, so feel free to leave me a comment - below.
Oh, and here's the ugly duckling from part 1 of this article, transformed...

Take care and take pictures!

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