At The Photography Show: Spring Shoots, professional product photographer Barry Mountford demonstrated some simple yet effective lighting setups at home, in real-time, featuring snoots, scrims and other studio-style secrets.
His shooting area is just 7 x 7 feet, so you don't need much space to replicate these results – which are ideal for trying at home. For lights Barry is using Pixapro CITI600 and CITI300 flash heads, with a variety of modifiers including a snoot and softbox for varying results.
• Read more: Best photography lighting kits (opens in new tab)
His demonstration is currently available to view for free here (opens in new tab), along with a host of other talks, sessions and presentations from The Photography Show: Spring Shoots.
Mountford uses Shadow Casters from Pixapro, which are a brilliant way to block some light from your flash to create dynamic interesting shadows, completely transforming the mood and atmosphere of your product pictures. Check out the video demonstration to see how they can change your images in real-time.
• Best camera for product photography (opens in new tab)
For settings Barry takes all of the images in manual mode with an aperture of f/8 for decent depth of field, a shutter speed of 1/200sec (which is about as fast as you can go without running into flash sync issues) and he's also using his lowest ISO setting to give him best possible image quality. He can then change the overall brightness of the image by moving the flashes closer or further away to the products.
If you weren't able to catch all of the brilliant content at The Photography Show Spring Shoots event, fear not! Lots of the content from over the weekend is now available to view and rewatch, so be sure to check it out here (opens in new tab).
Watch The Photography Show sessions on demand (opens in new tab)
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