I’ve posted about this before, but there is something so romantic about being able to do professional-looking product photography right in your kitchen and sharing the images with the Internet at large and watching them fumble all over themselves to figure out which studio you hired.
This is essentially the culmination of the progressively tumbling costs of photography equipment and exploding mindshare of innovators on the Internet. There are now low-cost solutions to problems that were insurmountable to the layman until only a few years ago and we have not only the actual photographic technology to thank for that, but also sites like handmade spark, who provide marketing advice to Etsy sellers.
I won’t delve too deeply into what Etsy is for anyone who may not know because it’s a bit beyond the reach of my topic here, but it is a marketplace of sorts, and thus it benefits greatly from well-executed product photography.
In any case, handmade spark posted an article about how to set up a really simple aluminum foil reflector setup that uses natural light to illuminate your (small) product subject and when I saw it I immediately thought (I’m really not kidding), This is exactly the kind of stuff my SSP audience would love to see.
This is miles beyond the whole Strobist crowd with their SB800s and their watt-seconds and their multiple white balances. There is a time and a place for off-camera flash, but check this out… We are lighting a product on our kitchen tables with aluminum foil-wrapped cardboard and we are getting sweet results.
A while back I posted that cool video of how a Leica lens is hand-assembled. At the time I mentioned that I’ve never owned nor even used a Leica lens but that I respected the craftsmanship and care with which they are put together.
It occurred to me back then that I had, indeed, seen videos of Canon lenses being assembled (specifically their “L” series; I am not sure if the non-L lenses are hand-assembled or not) but I didn’t have the presence of mind to go find them.
Because I’m still mostly a Canon devotee I thought it wise to catch up with that thought and post these behind-the-scenes videos of a Canon “L” lens being assembled, yes, by hand. Truly it is a marvel of engineering and of manual dexterity at some points. Hopefully if you, too, are a Canon shooter, these videos will give you even more respect for the product you likely hold in such high regard.
This is a three-part series and takes you all the way from “how do we make sand into a lens” to “this is how we put the barrel together.”
You guys are going to love this video of the making of a Leica lens. Admittedly, I have never owned a Leica camera or lens, but their reputation is world-renowned and it’s worth seeing the care that they do put into their products. For what it’s worth, many Canon lenses are hand-assembled as well (certainly the “L” lenses are) and the effort pays off.
Continuing down this path we’re on, looking into the inner workings of our photographic equipment, here is yet another fabulous video from the folks at Camera Technica showing you what the Canon 18-55mm aperture looks like when it opens and closes in slow motion. Well, somewhat slow motion. The aperture actually opens and closes so quickly that even in this high-speed video it’s still a very brief movement.
Check out Camera Technica for more about photographic technology.
That’s “image stabilization” for those of you not paying attention. Or “VR” for the Nikon folks out there. I believe Canon and Nikon use very similar electronic systems. Either way, this is fascinating. This is what the inside of a Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM lens looks like when the image stabilization is operating.
Use another reader