Simplifying product photography with pro shooter Barry Mountford

product photography
(Image credit: Barry Mountford)

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

His demonstration is currently available to view for free here, 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

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.

Watch The Photography Show sessions on demand

Read more:

Best mirrorless cameras
Best portrait lens
Best wide angle lens
Best standard zoom lenses

Dan Mold
Deputy Editor

Deputy Editor on PhotoPlus: The Canon Magazine, Dan also brings his technical wizardry and editing skills to Digital Camera World. He has been writing about all aspects of photography for over 10 years, having previously served as technical writer and technical editor for Practical Photography magazine, as well as Photoshop editor on Digital Photo

Dan is an Adobe-certified Photoshop guru, making him officially a beast at post-processing – so he’s the perfect person to share tips and tricks both in-camera and in post. Able to shoot all genres, Dan provides news, techniques and tutorials on everything from portraits and landscapes to macro and wildlife, helping photographers get the most out of their cameras, lenses, filters, lighting, tripods, and, of course, editing software.