Product shots, of course, are always a little tricky, especially when you have things like shiny screens to deal with.  Most of what I know about lighting things like this I learned from Light: Science and Magic, which teaches the fundamentals excellently, but also teaches them in a studio setting.  For someone whose entire lighting arsenal consists of three speedlights, two Pocket Wizards, some stands and umbrellas and cheap little accessories, working in a cramped office/bedroom—read: me—that doesn’t always work out so well, unfortunately, so for this shot I had to improvise.

The first thing to decide was what setting to put the phone in.  The typical look for product shots, of course, is an endless field of white, but somewhere between “Holy over-used clichè, Batman!” and “I really don’t feel like busting out my seamless paper today,” I decided to try making it look at home on my desk, instead.  So I cleared off a little space, and set the phone up, along with a couple odds and ends.  I left the wallet and keys in, as the obvious tip-offs to the desk setting, and decided to go ahead and leave some empty film spools and my old camera on the other side, framing the phone, and adding just a little (or, maybe a ridiculously obvious) hint of my photographic inclinations.

A natural light long exposure, to capture the screen

With the composition in place, I set the camera on a tripod and left it there, so that I could light the scene.  I stuck a single speedlight in an umbrella just forward of the scene, to try and put nice, big specular highlights on just about every reflective surface in the scene (which, my desktop included, was more or less everything).  With that accomplished, it was time to set about making the photograph.  My plan was to composite three images together, so I shot them one at a time.  The first image was a long exposure, using only natural light.  This showed just about nothing in the way of surroundings (and you can see how awfully lit what did show up was), but it did give me what I needed: the screen showed up beautifully.  With that out of the way, I was free to move on to the rest of the image, and not worry about whether or not it would be possible to make out the image on the screen.

The capture used for most of the phone's surroundings

The next step was to capture the phone’s surroundings the way I wanted them to look, as well as getting the phone the way I wanted it to look.  The trick here was to manipulate the specular highlighting, which would normally be done either by altering my light source, or by blocking out parts of it with a specially cut gobo.  Lacking space and materials, though, I had to settle for my general-purpose small piece of black foamcore, which acts as my gobo whenever I need one.  Rather than take extraneously large amounts of time to figure out exactly where to place it, moreover, I decided to just take the shotgun aproach.  The camera and umbrella were close enough together that I was able to simply hold the card in hand and move it around to different locations, blocking different amounts of specular reflection, while motoring my way through lots of exposures.  When I was finished, I just chose one  for the way the phone’s surroundings looked, and another for the “gloss line” that it put across the phone’s screen.

The exposure used for the phone itself, as well as some of the desktop area

With all the exposures ready, it was just a matter of performing the RAW conversions, and loading them all into GIMP.  I put all three images into a single file as layers, going from bottom-to-top in the order they appeared in this post.  First I put the second exposure on top of the first, lined everything up, and then layer masked out the screen area, so that the illuminated screen showed through.  With that accomplished, I layered the third exposure on top of the second, and lined that up as well.  With this one, I set the layer mask initially to full transparency, and then masked in the phone, as well as some of the desktop, because I liked the look of the right side of it from that exposure.  For the screen, I used a dark gray on the layer mask, so that the screen showed through, but the gradient created by the gobo also showed up nicely on top of it.  With that done, it was simply a matter of cropping the image, and I was done.  Here’s the final composited image, which will head up my upcoming review.

My Neo Freerunner: the ultimate phone

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