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Reflecting on Reflections, Part 3

Monday, June 28th, 2010

“The Shoot From Hell,” said one of my assistants, in reference to shooting the electronic control panel housed in brushed stainless steel.  Brushed stainless is no shiny brass doorknob to shoot, see previous blog post “Reflecting on Reflections, Part 2,” but it is definitely something difficult.  The unit (see images below) is a rather large, oblong-shaped, heavy electronic control panel with three red LED read-out screens which were as reflective as a mirror, housed inside of a brushed stainless steel shell, which was also quite reflective.

The brushed stainless, unlike the doorknob, won’t show my countenance, but will show all lights, colors, and dark areas surrounding it.  Any light that is not broad, whether a room light, a window, or the reflected light off our clothing, shows up as a blurry, colored reflection blob.  The size of the unit makes it difficult to isolate easily.  Many different exposures were made to control where lights sat, where reflectors were aimed, and where the assistants and I were situated.

Each setup or position of the unit was accompanied by moving lights and camera and adjusting everything many times.  My assistant who muttered the “From Hell” phrase, is himself a good photographer who eschews lighting and strobes to create images.  He mostly likes to shoot with available light.  He said it would drive him crazy trying to photograph things like this for a living.  I, on the other hand, view it as a challenge.

Finally, when I finished shooting the product, many hours were spent retouching and enhancing the images.  I then submitted the images to my client as low-res jpegs over the ‘net, and we worked together choosing the background for the images he liked.  See the images below.

While reflective objects present a challenge, make sure your attitude toward them is not defeatist.  This is difficult shooting to say the least.  Hard work and determination is the hallmark of anyone trying to get this done.

One last word on this kind of shoot.  It does not lend itself to using a point-and-shoot camera with the flash on the camera.  For the most part, it has certain minimum requirements of a good DSLR camera, and sufficient off-camera lighting and lighting equipment.  Otherwise, the results will be unsatisfactory and amateurish.

– Gary Silverstein

click on image to enlarge

click on image to enlarge

click on image to enlarge

Tags: enhance, Photoshop, reflecting, reflections, retouch, shoot, shooting
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Reflecting on Reflections, Part 2

Thursday, June 24th, 2010

Without a doubt, the hardest single thing I ever photographed was, of all things, something so ubiquitous that we handle them every day.  I am talking about door knobs.  Plain, highly reflective, brass doorknobs.  Now, why is it so hard to photograph a doorknob?  Well, it becomes a lot more difficult when there are some rules.  Rules like one would run into with a doorknob manufacturer looking for someone to shoot images of their products for promotions.  Do you think they want a reflected image of a happy, smiling distorted photographer looking out from their new brochure at the viewer?  How about seeing that photographer’s camera and tripod, or the space the doorknob happens to be in?  Simple, inexpensive, plain, highly polished brass doorknobs become painful to contemplate as a product photographer.  They not only are spherical and reflect the entire world around them, they have a backing plate made of the same stuff, that will reflect things that exist behind the knob, from the reflection on the back of the knob.  

Several years ago, we had spoken with a potential client, the marketing department head at a large manufacturer of doorknobs, hardware, and faucets about working for her company.  She said she had several photographers she used for shooting these products, but she said she would send us a sample of their products so that we could submit a test photograph to show that we could handle this type of photography, in case she needed our services.  Parameters for shooting this product were clear.  Shoot it on a 4″X 5″ transparency, and no retouching of any kind was permitted.  She said they did any retouching needed at the graphics department at the manufacturer.  

About 5 days later, the product arrived by UPS.  There was a plain brown cardboard box inside the outer package.  I opened it up and beheld a photographic nightmare.  It was an inexpensive, highly-polished brass doorknob set, complete with keys.  

It reflected everything!  It saw me, the room, everything in the room, and to my horror, the backing plate re-reflected everything the back of the knob “saw.”  I knew this was to be a fight.  I looked at images of doorknobs in advertising.  They looked perfect.  Some were “brushed” metal – not polished, but still shiny.  Some were dull finished, and just reflected highlights.  The polished ones stood out.  No reflections of photographers, cameras, tripods, rooms, etc.  I assumed that there was some reflection of a camera lens somewhere during the taking of the image, as there was no way to avoid the reflection from the angle presented.  A different angle may have allowed one to position the lens where the reflection would be positioned over the keyhole, but you can’t shoot there for different angles.  The first problem includes camera, tripod and photographer reflections.  One way to avoid this taking up a lot of room on the doorknob is to make a blind out of white material, like foam core, and cut a hole through which the camera lens “sees” the doorknob.  

Although this cuts down on untoward reflections, it still reflects the lens and the hole, unless the hole is dark and tight around the lens.  I figured this made for a minimum of retouching at the graphics department, and would be acceptable.  A second consideration was the lighting.  Lights or hot spots show up on the product itself and a smooth highlight with no hot spots would be a better solution.  Everything I tried did not work!  As said before, putting a piece of foam core in front of the doorknob cut down reflections, but I thought that aiming lights from behind the doorknob and bouncing the light toward the white foam core blind would produce the effect without bad reflections.  I was wrong.  The strobe “soft boxes” reflected into the back side of the door knob and re-reflected off the backing plate.  I had distorted oblong light reflections staring at me from the backing plate.  

It became evident there must be a way to do this.  I tried white sheets, but the lights created hot spots, and it reflected any corners and folds.  I had seen a shooting tent at my local pro camera store, and headed down there next.  A tent like this was used to evenly light small products and I thought this was the ticket.  It cost $250.00 plus tax.  I got the tent home, and assembled it.  It was made of a translucent white fabric, meant to diffuse the light inside.  It also was rigid and had seams and a rigid frame inside the fabric which showed up in the reflections.  It had several holes for camera placement, and try as I might with stuff to cover them, they showed up, too.  Fortunately, I was able to return the tent for a refund as it really didn’t do the job.  

I even talked to man who owned a company that made plastic blister packs in Santa Barbara.  I drove out to Santa Barbara to get a prototype dome of a transparent, but clouded plastic that he was thinking of producing.  It took out most of the distracting reflections, but reflected the cloudy nature of the dome and made the doorknob appear dull and not highly reflective.  I sent it back to Santa Barbara with a thank you note and a description of the effect.  

I finally built a box enclosure of translucent white plastic, got what I thought was a good image and sent that to the marketing manager.  She said to keep the doorknob, and she would call us if she needed us.  Last I heard, she was working for another company doing something completely different.  She never called!   

Below is the image I created, after scanning it and retouching it for our portfolio.  Shiny, reflective doorknobs are tough.  Try it if you doubt me.  

– Gary Silverstein      

Doorknob with minimal reflections - click on image to enlarge

Tags: 4x5, camera, photography, Photoshop, reflecting, reflections, retouch, shoot, shooting, view, view camera
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Reflecting on Reflections, Part 1

Saturday, June 19th, 2010

I was once asked about the hardest thing I ever photographed.  Of course there have been several difficult things to shoot, but as a commercial photographer, some product and catalog shoots and reflective objects just jump out.  Reflecting on a number I have done, I think they have gotten a bit easier for me with time, either because of experience, or the ability to use digital retouching and enhancement techniques, or both.  To say that there are no more challenges would be a misstatement, however.

My first bout with reflective product shots came during the era of film, long before digital capture or scanning was even possible.  Digital retouching was a pipe dream for the future.  I was asked to photograph jewelry with a large-format view camera (a 4X5) on transparencies.  We opted to use our then-considered-powerful 1200 watt-second Balcar studio strobe set for lighting.

The jewelry pieces were white metal (silver, I think) and included rings, earrings, and a necklace.  All pieces were to be shot in one image, laid out on a blue fabric.  I was to capture highlights from the reflecting white umbrellas mounted on the strobes in each piece of jewelry in the layout.

In those days, we were located just south of Hollywood, California, and there were many film labs nearby, so film processing turnover was fairly fast – three hours on a non-rush basis.  We had 4X5 Polaroid self- processing black and white positives that could be shot with the 4X5 camera that we could see as proofs prior to shooting the transparencies which needed processing at a lab.

The Polaroids were over a dollar each, in those days – a big, but necessary expense.  For this shoot, we went through something like ten of them, just trying to position the irregularly-shaped jewelry, so it would show certain highlights.  Each time we shot one, we would find one piece that would go dark, with no highlight.  It would have no sparkle, it would look, well . . .  black!  We finally got what looked like a good Polaroid, put in the transparency film holders and shot four transparencies of the same shot (one for us, one for the client, and two for insurance in case we needed to lighten or darken the exposure by chemical process).  We ran it to the lab up the road, and three hours later went over there to see our new transparencies.  One of the pieces of jewelry had moved slightly and it went dark.  There went a bunch of money, and a lot of time.  It took until the next day before we got it right.  It was a good experience, and I learned a lot.  I managed to find the image in our archives.  See it below.

– Gary Silverstein

Tags: 4x5, camera, film, jewelry, large format, layout, reflect, reflecting, reflections, shoot, shooting, view camera
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