How to make one strobe into many.

Hello everyone,

Hope everyone is doing well tonight. It's been a little over five months since my last blog, but it's alright, because I have a lot of cool behind the scenes stuff as well as tutorials to blog about. I'm also planning on keeping that promise I made when I first made this blog about providing tips and tricks to help improve everyone's photography, from those looking to get better pics out of their Point & Shoot camera, to the emerging professional.

Anywho, today I am going to talk about how I made the shot above.

Lately I have been dabbling with some product photography, but have given myself the challenge to use the least amount of strobes possible, this way I can learn how to control light a little more efficiently.

For the shot above, I only used one SB-800 speedlight directly above the controller, but with the use of various, strategically placed reflectors (any white piece of paper), I was able to put just the right amount of light where I needed, to fill in some of the shadows in the controller. As you can see from the image on the left, I shot the controller on glass so I'd be able to wrap the controller with reflectors to give me just the right amount of light around the entire remote, without having to place another strobe below the remote. Also, I played around a bit with the positioning of the strobe, moving it forward and back until I got just the amount of light i was looking for. I wanted to keep the remote as dark and contrasty as possible so If I had moved the light to the front of the controller to much, i would have had way too much light, and the remote would look grey.

Now you may be asking, what is all that stuff on the strobe? Well, I could have used an umbrella, or I could have bought a small softbox for the speedlight, but instead, I decided to use a folded piece of paper, taped to the sides of the sb 800. Had I used a bare bulb, I would have had some nasty specular highlights, (the best and quickest way I could describe this is sharp, harsh highlights). So to combat this, I placed the dome diffuser on the Sb 800 to spread the light out, then taped the piece of paper to spread the light more evenly, thus making the highlights softer.

As you can see above, there was some flare which washes out the picture, so I taped up some duvetyne (really good black fabric) to the sb, and viola! The other thing that was taped to the sb was to keep the duvetyne from moving the piece of paper/ softbox from its place.



Also, as you can see, I not only placed reflectors almost all around the controller, but I also placed a large reflector below camera to fill in the shadows just a bit.

Below is another view of the setup,



As far as post processing, this shot is admittedly a composite(as ALOT of work out there is) of three shots. There's the overall shot, a shot which I only took the D-pad, buttons, and analog sticks from, a shot where I only took the top part of the remote, with the L and the R, and the overall shot. I applied some contrast curve layers, being careful not to dip the shadows making them waaaayy too dark. I also desaturated the entire remote except for the colors on the buttons and the "sixaxis" on the top. For these parts I actually boosted the color by applying a hue and saturation layer, upping the saturation by about 15 to 20 points. What was the most time consuming was cleaning up the remote. Before I shot this I did my best to clean the remote, but high resolution is quite unforgiving in terms of dust and little particles not easily seen with the naked eye. I also windexed the hell out of the glass but no matter how many times i would do it, there were still little particles on the surface, so I clipped out the controller, and just placed a solid black background behind it. The last thing I did was make a duplicate copy of the clipped out controller, flip it vertically, placed it under the remote, and reduced the opacity a bit to make it look like a reflection.

I think I got a good shot of this remote by stretching one light source as much as possible. Theres a lot of surfaces and curves on this remote, so careful placement of the reflectors are necessary to put highlights exactly where you want them.

Well, that is all for now, I hope that wasn't too long of a read for you all, and I hope I was as clear and concise as I could be.

All the best,

Fredo