My Desktop Studio = Neat Portrait Pictures?

After some tinkering with my new rig, yes it is! Actually it is a no brainier, but some might fail to realize what other uses their gear, or rigs could do for them other than the intended purpose it was created. In the last entry I showcased my new set up for product photography, and after having a meeting with my client for the Flashing Panda product shoot, trying new set ups, I almost got burnt out and wanted to quit this deal! Honestly, the deal with product photography is to have consistent photos, but with many different products it is hard to attain and me not being an editor it is hard to get it all done on camera without doing much post processing that I dislike! (yuck!!!)

After some tinkering, I came up with some neat photo techniques to take products of large items! Also I have been getting better backgrounds! But still needs more tweaking and I must share this progress of this sword because it by far was the most difficult to photograph!

1/50 f8 ISO250 Flash power 1/8:1/4

But really the breakthrough in taking pictures of large objects wasn't the reason of this post, it is portraits! My system, If you kick out the table, and let the paper hang is good enough for close up portraits of anything! Here is the rig raised to about 6 feet to give me a nice white backdrop! 

After setting this up all my stress just melted away and I had fun once again taking photo's of myself and got ideas for future works. It honestly works really well. Here is a quick dirty picture of my ugly mug after 3 hours strait of figuring out new product photography methods.

 

1/60 f4.5 ISO200 Flash 1/8:1/4

As you can see, it isn't the best picture, it wont win any awards, but it is a start of what can be very interesting for future clients that want these kind of pictures! Recently I got the chance to work with a really hyperactive dog my friend recently adopted for her daughter! This was really quick and dirty since she came to show me last min, and wanted me to just take a picture to have some first memories of the new puppy!

1/80 f4.5 ISO 400 Flash 1:16:1/16

Note: ISO is 400 due to flash being so low and I didn't want to waste time setting the flash settings, instead raised ISO from 200 to 400 to get the right exposure.

This was a really fun experience to have! Having this paper is so wonderful to use because it really gets you focused on anything that isn't white. This background can also be different colors of gray to black, depending on how far the background is from the subject, another +1 to the usefulness of white stemless paper. Make a rig yourself guys! Its very nice tool to pull off some great shots!

Stay tuned for more updates!