Single Light Product Photography Tutorial

Photography Tips  •  Product Photography

A single strobe and a couple of modifiers. That’s all that Skyler Burt used for his one light product photography challenge:

Having just a single light to work with means it throws up a stiff challenge to produce a nice photo. Burt emphasizes the importance of having a plan in place as to how you want the final image to look.

Props

Props are important as they help you to build your shot as well as create the mood of it. Burt helps himself to several props.

Light

Burt uses an Elinchrom 500 Ws studio strobe for this shoot. He placed the light and the softbox very close to the product.

Since Burt was planning on blending several of these shots together, he first fired the light from camera left to capture an image of the smooth edge of the bottle, the wooden cap, and the label.

The light was then moved to camera right to capture a reflection on the nice flat area of the bottle.

Reflection

Burt went great to lengths to create appealing reflections. He used a sheet of white cardboard to capture an extended white reflection on the bottle from camera left.

He also used a piece of gold paper to reflect the light through the bottle to produce a golden reflection that transformed the image.

This is how he set up the lights on camera right for the second set of shots.

Post-Processing

The final step in the process is the post-processing bit.

Final Image

Watch the rest of the video to get a better understanding of how to blend several of these frames together to produce one really beautiful image.