This semester of school is quickly coming to a close and for one of my final projects, I was assigned to photograph an advertisement. Being a huge Apple lover, I decided to do it on one of their coolest devices ever made – the iPad.
I drew my inspiration on this set up from their window feeling that it’s the ideal way to advertise the device. It simply takes all the old, traditional means of media and puts it all into a digital, all-in-one device.
The number one challenge of this setup is working with reflections. With a glass display, photographing the device is almost like photographing a mirror, thus probably the reason why Apple usually goes with computer renderings for many of their advertisements. However, with careful placement, I can avoid unwanted reflection and create the image I want. In the image above, it’s quite apparent you are seeing myself in the image, something that I don’t want to do.
The next obstacle to face is lighting the device. The image above is lit with only one light – a softbox to be exact coming from behind the setup, towards the left. This helps create a highlight on the aluminum bevel of the iPad while lighting the items in the foreground.
With a light established, I next wanted to star filling the shadows throughout the image. In the image above, I decided to reflect light from the softbox and bounce it to the right edge of the iPad.
With the shadow and lighting the way I wanted it, it was now time to implement my favorite part of this shoot – lighting the reflection on the screen. This part was accomplished simply by bouncing light from a white card and catching it’s reflection on the screen. Ignore my dirty sensor – there are unwanted dust particles being captured in the image. This is more of a technical issue which I could not resolve during the shoot.
With the lights where I wanted them, I could now play with advertising the iPad itself. Using a longer shutter (about 1 half a second), I did a burn in of the screen, allowing the iPad to have some sort of life in it rather than just a blank screen. i also applied a light to the background to give it more of white clean look.
This pretty much sums up the product shoot I had today. After getting the lights set up, I changed some of the orientation of the items in the shot and ended up with the following final images:
Essentially, they are all the same images with different images put up on screen.
With all of that said, I hope you enjoyed reading up on this post. It’ll be a while before I post another one of these studio photography related articles.
Thanks for reading.