Quickie

Last week a client asked me to do some product shots that he needed in a hurry for a promotional campaign. He has ten pairs of sunglasses to photograph with the country flags on the lenses for each land competing in the forthcoming football world cup. Time was of the essence so I decided to shoot them in my front room.

 The products

Another friend recently asked for advice on using a Somikon "Studio Box"  which she'd recently purchased so I used the sunglasses as a test so that I could show here the results that can be obtained from this piece of equipment.

I set up the studio box on a table in my sitting room and placed the glasses on the bottom. Using my Canon 5d MKII with a 50mm lens and my Benbo tripod.

To prevent my constantly bending over to look through the viewfinder, I attached my camera to my Samsung Galaxy tablet using the free DSLRdashboard software which is available from the Google Play store. This software shows me the captured image and I can zoom in and out to check focus etc. The software also has the option to save the images onto the device itself or just on the memory card.

I started at nine o'clock and with the help of the software and a big display, I was able to move various reflectors and light blockers around until I had an image that the client wanted.

 1st set-up. Too many reflections

The set-up I ended up using.

Another piece of equipment that I put to use were my Phottix Odin wireless flash triggers. These are quite simply, fantastic flash triggering devices. As they are wireless, they can fire the flash around corners and out of line of sight. With more than 2500 exposures I have not had one single misfire. You can also control the individual flash compensation by thirds of a stop. 

Glamour photographer Michael Zelbel also uses these triggers and have uploaded an interesting video about them. 

With the help of all these time saving devices I was able to get a good setup which I mailed to the client. He gave me the OK and I then photographed the next nine pairs.

After converting the CR2 RAW files into high resolution JPG's, I uploaded them to a website where I can apply clipping to make the background pure white.

Total time for the job was four and a half hours.

Here's one of the finished images.

Thanks for reading.