Shooting a product shot on black glass

- One of the curious things about the internet age that we live in is that, because of Ebay and Craigslist, we've all kind of become amateur product photographers. And today on the Practicing Photographer, I want to show you a cool trick you can use to give your product photography a different look. If you're like me, most of the time if you're throwing something up on Ebay or Craigslist, you have a little light tent or something that you put it in, which gives you a nice white limbo background, and that's great, but we have something much cooler here. We have a black background that I want to show you. So I want to start by showing you the shot that we're going to take.

And that's this one right here. I got this nice old camera here, sitting on this cool black background, with this slash of light behind it. And all of that is being made possible because of one very simple piece of technology, and that is this piece of black plexiglass here. This is round piece of black plexiglass that we have attached to a tabletop. You can get a piece of black plexi online for not too much money. This one's pretty thick, and it's round, which makes it more expensive. You could get a square piece of black plexi a couple of feet on a side, for forty or fifty bucks.

If you want to go less expensive, you can make your own sort of effect here by getting a piece of glass and putting something black underneath it, like a piece of black cloth. The reason this piece is so critical is because it's basically serving as a mirror. I'm going to zoom out on my camera here and I think you're going to get a better idea of what's going on. This is what I'm seeing right now as I stand behind the camera and look towards my scene. Here's my tabletop, here's my camera. And you can see that I've got just a reflection of, this is hard to do here, I've got a reflection of this white material that has been positioned behind the camera.

That's this white material right here. There are two things going on here that are very critical. I have nice lighting on my subject here, and I have some special lighting being bounced off this card onto the surface of the table. The surface of the table's just acting like a mirror and that's what's giving me this cool slash of light behind my camera. Black is a little bit different than a normal mirror. If this was a normal mirror, it wouldn't have this cool black, kind of limbo thing going on, it would just have a perfect reflection of the ceiling.

So the black is serving as a mirror, it's just not as good a mirror as a normal mirror. It's not bouncing back everything, and so I'm getting this nice lighting effect. We're going to come back to this bit in a minute. I want to talk for a minute about my lighting on the camera here. One of the easiest ways to get good product lighting, that being lighting that really wraps around my subject, doesn't give me any bright highlights, gives me nice, even light, one of the easiest ways to do that is to get a really large light source fairly close to your subject, to your product here.

And the way that I'm getting a large light source is through two lights that are up above. I'm going to show them to you now, but I want to issue the disclaimer that what you're seeing here is I'm not just in a photo studio, I am in a video production studio, and I'm being lit also, and we've got microphones going on, and all sorts of other stuff. But right up here you can see the two lights that I'm using to light my subject here. These, in this case they're large fluorescent light sources, and they've got big pieces of diffusion wrapped over them, that's creating a really soft light that's just wrapping round my subject very very nicely.

Now, you don't have to have something this extravagant. You can get the same thing using a smaller light source and a big piece of diffusion, you could do the same thing with strobes. You're going to, if you're using smaller light sources, you're going to need to get them in closer to get the same kind of effect here. And there you're going to be balancing getting them close enough to get the light that you want without having them reflected in the table. A lot of this kind of work is just trial and error. You've just got to move things around until you get the right set of reflections and lights and whatnot, that you want. So that's my lighting for this, and that's working really well, that's taken care of, I don't even need to think about that any more.

So, look at what happens here. As I wave my hand around, you can really see that this is just a mirror. So all that's going on to create this effect in the background of the camera and to create this cool reflection, I love the reflection that goes straight down so I've got this wonderful mirror image of the camera. All that's happening to make that work is I have a large light source right here, which is bouncing up at a bounce card, and that's what's reflecting onto the table. Now, what's interesting is from where you're looking right there, you don't see any of that reflection.

But when I come back over here to my camera, and zoom back in, this might make a little more sense to you now. All that this pattern is behind here is just that reflection off of that bounce card reflecting on the table. The black is actually not black, it's gray. Those are the lighter parts of the bounce card reflecting in the table. So that's really all I've done, is just set up a nice reflection, that's starting over here and reflecting out of this table here.

What's cool is, because it's this bounce card, rather than light shining directly over here, it's completely isolated from my subject. Now, you can't see this from where you're at, but I'm not getting any spill onto my camera here. It's nicely contained with its lighting, and my reflection is nicely contained over here. They're totally separate. What that means now is that I can start playing with this stuff back here to change the effect that's going on on the table. I'm going to zoom back in here so that you can really see what's going on as I mess with my light. So now what I'm going to do is play with the slash of light back here.

What's going on is I've got a light with some barn doors on it. The barn doors let me shape the light. So I can make this wider if I wanted, I can make it really narrow, I can change the direction of it. And all of that gets immediately reflected in the table. But my lighting on the camera never changes. Because it's all just happening off this bounce card. I could also change the color of the light. I happen to have a really nice light here, that allows me to just dial in different colors. I can do that just by turning some knobs here.

I can get a nice blue color, and then I could start changing the hue. So I could really go for a lot of different looks here. And again, none of the light on my camera here is changing. It's still staying nice and neutral. You could get the same effect using a less sophisticated light, just by putting gels over it, colored gels, which will change the color of the light. You could also do all of this stuff with strobes. I could have a strobe here with a gel on it pointed at this bounce card, and that would be reflecting onto here.

So, that's my set-up. It's really not that complicated. I know that it might be a tiny bit confusing for you because you're looking at the side, but I've just got a perfectly straight line here. I have my camera, my subject, my light, my bounce card. Up above I have two highly diffused lights just wrapping round my subject here. So I'm going to zoom back in here. And I'm going to go ahead and take the shot. I should probably make sure I'm focussed. There we go.

And here we go. Here's the shot, after a crop. I think it looks great. It's a very different look from that white limbo background look. Again, I can change the color of the light, I can change the shape of the light, I can really play with that a lot. If I've got multiple objects in the frame I may want to go for a bigger splash of light, or maybe just a narrow one that serves to accent. So, again, a very nice effect, a very sophisticated-looking effect, that you can get very easily just with a simple piece of black plexiglass and a couple of lights and a bounce card.