Today I was looking up product photographers to see some competition. I found some good ones and not so good ones. Then I stumbled onto some tutorials and of course I had to take a gander!
Now the funny thing about the internet is there is good content and generic piece of crap content that is just to rank a website.
Point and case!
Here you have this so called “school” that wrote this junk article to get rankings for product photography. Now the first thing you should know is buying a crappy tent with these hot lights does not and will never be consider quality product photography. Anyone can pay $75 on Ebay for these tents and have a camera and call them a “product photographer”, but that doesn’t make you one! In no way do these things ever turn out like the samples they show you, and the reason is? They Photoshop the hell out the thing to make it look good.
Product Photography with a Tent
Then the site goes on to tell you how you can mimic the tent box as if you you really need to duplicate the worst kind of product photography out there. Listen folks, you just need a roll of paper to create a seamless background and then some real lights aka strobes that have soft boxes attached to them, you don’t need this tent or hand made box! Don’t waste your time shooting product in this fashion, there are far better methods that produce way better results.
Problem 1.
The lights aren’t really controllable, you don’t have any proper angles because the tent is blocking things. They are hot lights and therefore you can’t use any power and have to jack with the camera settings and shoot with this super slow shutter speed or really shallow depth of field to get the exposure right. Not to mention the light is horribly soft and therefore the final image will look a little soft from all the soft light you are using.
Problem 2.
You get ZERO front lighting! Yup that’s right you can’t get any front lighting because as soon as you move a light around to the front you lose the diffusion! Sure you can add a new light with alternative diffuser, but then you would actually need real equipment which at that point might as well buy real equipment instead of this crappy tent box!
Problem 3.
It isn’t really white! Since you don’t have control over the light intensity, usually the background is grey! And the main reason people buy these things is so they can have a white background to put the image up on their ecommerce website, but guess what it never happens! Fire up that Photoshop. Not that you can ever truly get full white but at least with strobes and other equipment you can get most of it white and minimize the post production.
Product Photography Solution
Stop wasting your time reading crappy internet sites that obviously have no real quality of content but just junk articles and information that is catered toward wanna-be’s or amateurs. Buy some real equipment, find some good video sites that show you true studio photography instead of this quick trick nonsense. You need to get some experience, and practice makes perfect. There is no quick trick to becoming good at photography, there are no shortcuts, you have to put in the time and energy and be serious about it. Take pride in what you do, and don’t give any credence amateurs information like product photography tents!