Photography Tips

Today we’re going to look at a simple lighting setup that you can easily do at home to add a professional look to your still life shots, eBay ads, product photos and anything else you can think of. I’ve used the vegetables I just bought at the market for this, but the principles will be the same for anything you care to substitute.

Setting up for this shot was quick and easy. I came back from the market with a bag full of vegetables and basically dumped them onto a piece of white seamless. To the left, I placed a flash on a lightstand pointing into a bounce umbrella. A couple of test shots showed too much shadow on the right, so I placed a sheet of white cardboard on the right to act as a reflector to throw a little light back into the shadows. I didn’t want to completely eliminate the shadow - if I did, I could have placed another light there, or moved my camera left light to a more overhead position.

Here’s the lighting setup. The diagram is from www.kevinkertz.com who makes a lighting diagram file available for sharing of setups. It’s a layered PSD file and you can move things around until it shows the lighting setup you need.

As long as you have some means of getting the flash off-camera, all you really need is an umbrella and you can replicate this. I used a bounce umbrella but you could just as easily use a shoot-through. In fact, I normally use shoot-throughs when I incorporate umbrellas - the umbrella I used can be used as both a bounce and a shoot-through. The only reason I chose to bounce was because I was too lazy to remove the black/silver backing from the umbrella. For my Taiwan readers, convertible umbrellas are available at Keystone for under NT$1000 - I think I paid $700 (US$20) and lightstands for a similar price. And that’s really all you need, moneywise. You could even get away without using an umbrella and shoot through a white bedsheet or shower curtain. For a reflector, I used a sheet of cardboard and you could use the same as a background as well in place of the white seamless. I had an Elinchrom Skyport as my flash trigger - for those wanting to do things cheaper, there are a variety of very cheap RF triggers, affectionately known as Poverty Wizards, available for US$20 or so on eBay, and as a bonus for those in Taiwan, these triggers are available in most camera stores for a few hundred NT$. You could also use PC cords or TTL cords.

For these shots, I set my camera and flash to manual. I used the Canon EOS 5D Mark II with a 50mm f1.8 lens and 550ex speedlight triggered by the Elinchrom Skyport. The flash was set at 1/8 power, and the camera was ISO200, f5.6 and a 1/200 shutter speed.