Assignment 2: Product on Location - Part II

1. Final photo-shoot report and analysis

Our final shoot took place as planned on February 25th.  We were reasonably satisfied with our final shot and layout but with some reservations.  After considering again the results of our pre-light polaroid, we had decided on a slightly modified setup.  We needed a wider depth of field and wanted to manually focus within the first third of the subject.  This, we hoped, would lead to a crisper rendition of the soup.  With this in mind, we changed our aperture to f.8 and moved the table forward in order to throw the background a little more out of focus.  We wanted to retain the angle created by the rear bench but needed to avoid it becoming a distraction.  We made this shift but were now in a situation where the ambient light we had used in our test shot was no longer as strong.  We were also interested in experimenting with our initial setup to try and give the subject a little more impact.  At this stage we brought in a tungsten light and a White Lightning monoblock with a small softbox.  The modified setup is given below:

We also took digi-polaroids of our setup for future reference:

figure 1

figure 2

Our thinking behind the softbox was to provide some more even lighting for the soup - we were not comfortable with the amount of light getting into the bowl.  We wanted to continue to using modelling lights only so the White Lightning was set to half-power.  The second component in the new set up was the tungsten light (see figure 2, above).  The intention here was to fill in the background a little more but this time with a light we could control.  We wanted to retain a suggestion of the rich brown in the background but without the danger of distracting highlights.  The final shot, taken at f.8 and 1/6th sec. provided a good light balance with some latitude for adjustments in post-production.  At this time, a grey card reading was also taken to provide a reference for later white balance adjustment.

To summarize, we changed our setup quite dramatically by adding two tungsten light sources, the softbox (see figure 1) and the single light directed on the background.  We also closed down one stop in order to get more depth of field. We worked with the same shutter speed we had used in the pre-light, again to provide some of the 'warmth' we had found in the test.  We knew, however, that keeping this and using all-tungsten light sources would bring us some white balance issues along the way.  We also modified the framing of the shot.  In order to respect the layout, the bowl needed to move further up the page but we also wanted some crop 'potential' for final adjustments in post production.  It was not necessary to use a polarizing filter but we were a little thrown by getting a different soup from that we had been provided for the test.

All in all though, the shot worked well.  More experience always helps and we felt that we learned a lot on this assignment.  The final shot with layout is below: