Illustrative Editorial shots can fill in the days

Being isolated at home can be OK for a time, but unless you are active in some way, the days can get very long. If you are able to work your normal job from home, that is great, but if that isn’t possible then what can you do. To some extent I am used to this sort of life, having worked from home for about 10 years now, but I’m missing the trips to see new places and I am pretty much up to date with my historic image processing and keywording. So I looked around for something new. I have a plan to really get going with scanning my old 35mm slides – not particularly for stock use, more so that we can relive some of those ancient trips and events! If you remember, I made a 35mm slide scanner but have yet to really put it to use. Now I have time to do that!

I’m also playing around with software packages to learn how best to use them. I’ve mentioned Luminar 4 (and it is still on sale if you are interested) before, but I did another sky replacement yesterday. The original was pretty boring:

I took this while waiting for the supermoon last week. I liked the way the setting sun lit up the downtown area, but the sky was just plain and boring. This is the processed version from Luminar 4 with a new sky, obviously, but also some landscape enhancement using the “golden hour” sliders:

Unfortunately, I submitted the old shot to the stock agencies and so I’m bound to get a rejection if I decide to submit this one. I might wait a bit and do it later!

But in the shorter term, I decided to take some illustrative editorial shots of products that might be in demand as the weeks of isolation move forward. I’ve only just started this, but I first set up my studio to make this as simple and painless as possible.

I already had the folding white box which is basically one of those fold flat reflectors that opens up into a pretty large enclosure for the product. I placed a shiny white acrylic panel in there to give a pure white surface with some nice reflections. I also wanted to minimize any post processing and so I didn’t want any lines or darker areas that I needed to somehow remove in Photoshop, so I used my two LED panels on each side to light up the products and also bounce light around the surface. I have just “invested” in two Rotolight NEO2 LED lights/flash units. Normally these cost around $300 each, but B&H and other outlets in the US had them on sale for $149. With that sort of reduction, I couldn’t help myself and bought two. They are very controllable lights with the color temperature adjustable from tungsten all the way to shade conditions as well as doing various special effects for video lighting such as a wood fire, lightning and strobe lighting. I noticed that they are back at $299 with B&H but are $203 at Amazon. Perhaps they will come down again?

I used these at the back so that I could adjust the brightness to blow out the back panel to pure white, and control the light on the product with the side units. I had the camera on a tripod because the depth of field is quite shallow, which called for a smaller aperture, which resulted in a long duration shot – about 0.5 seconds or so. I did quite a lot of going backwards and forwards with the memory card to process my shots in Lightroom, but this morning I came across an article from Scott Kelby about tethering a Sony camera to Lightroom and so I spent a bit of time doing that earlier today – it works great and I can immediately see whether my shot is in focus, well exposed etc and process it without constantly taking that SD card out.

So what am I taking? Well, toilet paper is always in the news, so here is a close up of a roll. I’ll take offers for it later:

Funnily enough, Adobe Stock rejected this as not meeting their definition of an illustrative editorial shot – maybe they can’t see the Charmin word on the roll? I can also see that this is not really a pure white background either when I paste it into the page here. Need to do a bit more on that lighting!

I’ve also done some of the usual products needed to fight an illness:

I thought there might be a demand for images of the generic medicine rather than the trade name of Tylenol (or paracetamol in the UK)

Will these be big sellers – probably not, but getting set up for images against white is useful experience and if I make a note of my final lighting settings, I can set this up again in the future without any delay. And learning to tether my camera was worthwhile as well. So happy shooting and stay safe!