Today begins a grand experiment. I just lost my job due to the Coronavirus, and have joined the growing and scary (perhaps scared) ranks of the unemployed. I am grateful to my employer and glad that they expect to hire us all back in a few weeks (although that may be wishful thinking). In the meantime, I am home, self-isolating with my favorite person: my wife Karen.
Idleness is not in my nature, so I am determined to make the best use of my new free time. I’m working with my pastor and our elders to get our church services up and running online, I’m going to start a podcast, and, most assuredly, I’m going to be working hard to build up my freelance business.
As a perhaps frivolous disctraction, I’m also setting the goal of photographing one thing from around my house every day. Ordinary, things. Perhaps odd things. Whatver strikes my fancy. We’ll see where this leads….
To kick things off I decided to challenge myself to recreate the pack shot of my podcasting microphone.
Here is what the shot looked like in the studio (large image), and on the computer (inset).
And here is a closeup of the original package (left), and my version (right). As you can see, I nailed the angle and perspective pretty well, and overall the shots are comparable. Each shot has strengths and weaknesses, and if I were shooting this image for real, I would have tweaked things. For instance, I would have lighted the top of the mic barrel better in order to make the brand name stand out more clearly. On the other hand, I think my lighting of the little tripod is better than on the package.
The thing that really stood out to me was the ridiculous shadows of the tripod legs on the pack shot. I sort of duplicated them in my version (and it turned my stomach to do so), but they still look ridiculous. Those three little shadows were added in post-processing to try to give a more three-dimensional look, but they so blatently scream Photoshopped! that I can’t believe it got past the art director.
Anyway, Day 1 is “in the can,” as they say. Just a fun little exercise in product photography. (And for any potential clients out there reading this, yes, I can shoot your stuff as well as anyone—and I won’t add silly shadows.) Who knows what I will shoot tomorrow…
Let’s keep away from each other, and stay healthy!
