Will Robb Photography

Recently I did a shoot for The Japan Times on whisky and chocolate for the one and only Nick Coldicott. Another excellent article by Nick, but a different kind of shoot for me this time. Usually it’s a piece on a specific bar or drink, so I have to go off somewhere, but this time seeing as how it was a general piece that was more of a product type shoot, I could stay at home and work with bits and bobs I had lying around (most importantly, whisky and chocolate I guess). Here are some of the images I submitted and the final piece in print.

Product shoots isn’t something I do a lot of, most of the product shots I’ve taken have been at events where there is an excellently lit set up and it makes photos easy, this time I had to work with what I had at home. Most importantly, I needed light and this was provided by my canon speedlights, a 580EX and a 580EX II. I used them both as off shoe (ie not attached to the camera) slave flashes and triggered them with a canon speedlight transmitter ST-E2, which I attach to the cameras hot shoe where you usually attach the flash. For this, all you do is set the flashes away from “master” to “slave” settings and hey presto, you can work them up to about 10m away from you camera. Brilliant. Actually, as a side note, even if you have a canon speedlight attached to your camera, you can use it in Master mode and have other off shoe slave units flash at the same time, think it may just be a feature of the new 580EXII, but I could be wrong. Here’s what the transmitter looks like on the camera.

I don’t have a dome for shooting products, so I used a large sheet of A0 size white card, angled it against the dryer sitting in my spare room and held it in place with a couple of small p.c speakers and lit from above with a regular lamp. So, I have my basic setup with the card held in place with a lamp above, then I poured some whisky into one of my whisky glasses, broke some dark chocolate up and scattered it around the glass and then I had my set up. I positioned the speedlights around the whisky and chocolate, angled the flash heads at the ceiling to bounce light off the ceiling and help get rid of shadows. With one flash and one lamp, there would be harsh shadows, with both flashes being used the shadows are mostly canceled and with the flash being bounced, there is no real harsh glare on the glass either. If you flashed directly onto the glass, even with a diffuser there would be too much glare. Easy home made product kit. When you zoom out from the final published image and see the whole scene it doesn’t look that nice at all, but most product shots you see in magazines and banners every day are just the same.