Stainless steel - best way to light.?

[Deleted member 9479]

Hi all.

I have a small project on at present which involves taking photos of stainless steel plate objects - door entry panels, access keypads etc.. and these seem to range from about 5-6" high, up to 20" high. All I need to end up with are decent 'pack shots' so to speak, but I'm not overly happy with the results (might just be overly critical I don't know - been looking at these things for days now ). I've tried shooting in a light box/tent as these things can't be stood up easily and I wanted to control the spread of light.

I do have studio lights - Interfit Stellars - but I was hopeing to complete this just using flash if possible.

Not looking for 'photo feedback' as such but are these ok or not, and is there a better or different way to shoot these things. Am I doing it right in the first place.?

Any suggestions or comments please

Cheers

 

[Garry Edwards]

Welcome to my world, where boring subjects need to be made to look exciting...

A light tent/cube whatever is a de-skilling tool, ideal for people who don't know and don't want to know, but the wrong choice for shots that need to say 'touch me'.

The answer, for people who just want to know the principle and not the detail, is to control and make use of the reflections, not to kill them. The technique is to use large light sources (at least 3 times the size of the subject but preferably larger) just out of shot, to create diffused specular highlights.

Specular highlights are reflections of the light, diffused specular highlights are reflections that you can see through to he subject beneath, preserving the detail.

All is explained in 'Controlling specular highlights' in this list of lighting themes on another forum. I include the complete list because there are others there that touch on this kind of subject too.

 

[Deleted member 9479]

Hi Gary.

Thanks for the link - wow.. lots of reading to do then!

So are you saying that I should really be using the studio lighting - either studio lights with diffusers or the Stella flash heads with soft boxes, and not use the light cubes and flash.?

 

[Garry Edwards]

Hi Gary.

Thanks for the link - wow.. lots of reading to do then!

So are you saying that I should really be using the studio lighting - either studio lights with diffusers or the Stella flash heads with soft boxes, and not use the light cubes and flash.?

Yes, forget the light cubes. Use any kind of light you like. What matters is that the light is properly diffused - softbox, silk, whatever you've got or can put together and position correctly

 

[Deleted member 9479]

Ok point taken. So if I dump the light cubes, should I be using a 'lighting table' or 'photo table' to get the best results. In case I'm using the wrong terminology I mean one of these:

The other reason for using/trying the light cubes is space - I only have a very small studio area and need whatever I use to be foldable/colapsable for storage.

Cheers

 

[Garry Edwards]

Product shooting tables are fine for this purpose (but not this design, if you're going to get one it should be like a chair without a seat or back, allows light to be shone through the back and/or the base without obstruction) but you don't need one for this job.