Another Home Product Studio Setup

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.

Alright, I feel as though I’ve gushed about this enough. Read it for yourself: Studio Quality Product Photography with a $12 Set Up