Creative Product Photography With Speedlight Flash Units

For this particular lighting lesson, I wanted to demonstrate how you could use two Speedlight flash units to achieve creative product lighting results. You don’t need big, expensive studio lighting to achieve big studio results. Using Speedlight flash units allows you flexibility and the ability to travel light, especially if you are working on location for a client.

For the photo in this demonstration, I used a syringe as my product. I wanted to create a stylized shot of the syringe showing the product as well as its use. The shot set-up is basic; using my living room coffee table, I placed a white 2’x3’ piece of plexiglass I purchased from a local hardware store for about $5.00 and change.

I positioned the syringe on the plexiglass, and placed two Nikon SB800 flash units to the rear of the syringe, at a 45° (you can see their angle of light by studying the shadow, which falls toward the front and to the sides of the syringe). Just a note on the flash units, I placed them flat on the table. No light stands or clamps where used for this shot. Just the flash units resting on their back sides.

Setting each flash unit to manual setting at one-quarter power, I gelled one flash with a blue color gel while the other with an amber gel. Both gels are part of Nikon’s SJ1 kit. However, if you are not using Nikon Speedlights, you can purchase colored gels in sheets or cut pieces from a variety of online photo retailers as well as amazon.com.

Now, there are several ways you could trigger your flash units. I chose to trigger the flash units by attaching a PocketWizard Plus II to one flash and set the other flash unit to SU-4 mode where it would act like a slaved strobe, similar to what you would have in a studio with larger strobe flashes. I chose to go this method because I didn’t have an SU-800 Commander module with me and I didn’t want to deal with any secular lighting from the D300’s pop-up flash on the syringe. Just a side note: The D300’s pop-up flash will send out pre-flashes, triggering the other remote flash units when you are using the flashes in CLS. While the pop-up flash does not give off a burst of light when turned “off” in the camera, you can still pick up some stray light on the subject if you are real close to your subject as I was in this case.

With the flash units in position, I took a few shots of the syringe by itself. To create the appearance that liquid (in this case, I used water) was spurting out of the syringe, I took a separate shot, holding my camera in one hand while pressing the syringe down with the other.  Using Adobe Photoshop, I blended both images together to create the final photo.

 

Lighting Diagram and Set-up Information for Creative Product Shot

1. I used a living room coffee table for my set-up. Any table large enough will suffice.
2. White colored plexi glass purchased for about $5.00 used for reflection
3. SB800 flash unit with a PocketWizard Plus II attached and an amber gel
4. SB800 flash unit in SU-4 mode with a blue gel attached
5. They product. In this case, a syringe.
6. Nikon D300 with a PocketWizard attached.

Download Article in pdf Format

2 Responses to “Creative Product Photography With Speedlight Flash Units”

1. Karen Albright says:

   April 1, 2011 at 3:49 pm

   Alyn, another great post. I like that you include the lighting diagrams. Very helpful. And the pdf downloads of the articles are nice as well.

   On another note, I noticed that the color saturation between the final photo and the one where you are pressing down on the syringe are different. Can you shed some light on this issue?

   Thanks, Karen – a loyal fan.

   Reply
2. Alyn says:

   April 1, 2011 at 3:56 pm

   Thanks for the compliment Karen. Glad you like the posts and pdf’s.

   Regarding the color: I did open up the lens about 1/2 stop on the shot where I was pressing down. However, in the final image, I added a bit of saturation and dropped the exposure by 1/2 stop or so. Did all of this in Lightroom.

   Reply