Wow, what a fantastic opportunity last weekend!  Karim called me a few weeks ago with a great story.  He’s a young entrepreneur importing pottery from Egypt.  The pottery is designed by his father and made from a strong resin compound molding into large vessels suitable for planting large trees.  What a terrific product for South Florida!

Anyway, I met up with him last Saturday to take a few shots of his products.  Warning…I’m going to talk a little shop here.  To be honest, I’ve only ever lit products in the studio under very controlled conditions, so I wasn’t exactly sure before I arrived how we’d shoot this all in his warehouse.  Would it be dark, too confined, ugly background?  Uh, yeah, all of the above.

Seriously, it came off really well.  We popped open the warehouse door and moved the products over to the door’s edge.  Problem: the door faced east into the morning sun, which blasted down on our products with blistering ferocity.  Solution: be thankful I brought my Photoflex LitePanels.  I set up a 39″x72″ frame, threw a translucent fabric over it, and I had one nifty, large soft box, which I used to block out the direct sun and diffuse the light.  Thanks, Gene Kester!

And then, there was the background: your basic drywall and a cement floor.  OK, so, at least the drywall was white.  A shallow depth of field on a DX format camera makes short order of any imperfections.  The shadow falloff gave some texture to the wall, too.  And…quick thinking got us to pull a small table (courtesy of IKEA) out of the front office.  Voilà, a nice faux floor!

OK, enough shop talk.  It was fun and here are a few of the shots that Karim will be adding to his catalog.  The last one is just a client sample to show how the images could look in a brochure–sweet!