Stu­dio Setup for prod­uct photography

One of our strengths is our flex­i­bil­ity, so when I was invited to sub­mit a sam­ple image of clip in hair exten­sions in a bid to win a com­mer­cial pho­tog­ra­phy con­tract, I had to give some seri­ous thought to the set up. We had to cre­ate a stu­dio envi­ron­ment that was replic­a­ble, easy and quick to set up, and most impor­tantly show­cased the prod­uct much bet­ter than the exist­ing in house images.
The solu­tion we went with was to set up a high­key shoot in our stu­dio and to place the hair pieces on a fem­i­nine poly­styrene model head (some heads look like SMERSH pro­tag­o­nists from an early James Bond movie).
One of the most impor­tant aspects of the brief was to ensure the hair colour­ing in the final images was an accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the hair piece fea­tured. This meant using a fixed light source with a known colour tem­per­a­ture to achieve a con­sis­tent white bal­ance.
White Bal­ance is a mea­sure of the spec­trum of light emit­ted from a block of metal at dif­fer­ing tem­per­a­tures, mea­sured in °Kelvin. So as a guide, Day­light is 5500°K, House hold tung­sten blubs are 3500°K, a cloudy day is 6500°K. As a neat exam­ple, the next time you’re out­side after sun­down look into a win­dow of a room lit with stan­dard tung­sten bulbs, you might be sur­prised at how orange the light is!
As we have con­tin­u­ous day­light light­ing units for use on loca­tion at video shoots, I utilised two sets of lights to illu­mi­nate the sub­ject. This meant I knew the white bal­ance would be the same for every hair piece, so when I opened the cam­era RAW file in Light­room 3, if the auto white bal­ance was off I could man­u­ally set the white bal­ance to 5500K in the con­trols.
By using stu­dio lights on the sub­ject, the images out­put from Light­room showed the hair colour to be exactly the same as the orig­i­nal hair piece. Using fixed stu­dio light­ing and mount­ing the cam­era on a tri­pod meant the cam­era could be setup in man­ual. The only para­me­ter that needed check­ing for each hair piece was the focus. I like to use the live view on the back of my Canon SLR to zoom in 10 times and focus man­u­ally, using a Zeiss lens.

Unex­pected fac­tors can crop up with a new project, and with this project it was the degree of style the hair pieces required (maybe for a lady pho­tog­ra­pher this would not have been a sur­prise). Luck­ily for me my eldest daugh­ter was around and I employed her ser­vices in prepar­ing them as they had been rolled up for dis­tri­b­u­tion to us. She needed to use hair straight­en­ers to reduce the curl­ing, and I was really pleased that she was around as straight­en­ing hair appears to be an acquired skill, which would have had me spend­ing a frus­trat­ingly long time prep­ping each hair piece.

Pro­mo­tion Media pro­vide com­mer­cial pho­tog­ra­phy across Berk­shire, Dorset, Hamp­shire, Som­er­set, Wilt­shire and in this case London.

Regards, Simon