Project 365 - Day 32 - Memories of Small Product Photography

Sometimes I like to look back on assignments that I did for my various photography classes and think about how I could have done them differently - better even.  In class you have a 3 hour window to get your shot right, and you are working with a group as well so it's difficult.  In my case, the group I was working with worked really well together and we usually all got our shot.  Some of us would go home and re-shoot, but for the most part we used our time properly.

Today's shot brings me back to the first assignment for Small Product Photography with Bob Hundert at Sheridan College in Oakville.  If you are interested in learning more about photography, I recommend the Sheridan program - there are a lot of good instructors there and as it is night school everyone is pretty serious about it.  You learn so much from shooting with other people.

Ok, back on track.  The first assignment was to "shoot a diet coke can".  The idea is that the diet coke can is silver, and silver is a mirror, so you were to set up your lights in such a way that you didn't see any of the gear or photographers in the reflection on the can.  Simple right?  Not.  You can see my final shot here.

When all was said and done, Bob got 28 pictures of a diet coke can.  28 of the SAME picture. 

So how could we have done this differently? Well, first of all get rid of the silver can.  Yeah, I know, the whole point was to make you shoot the silver can so that you would learn about reflections.  But that was a rule, and we all know that in Photography rules are made to be broken!  :-)

Bring in the Coke Zero can.  And instead of a white backdrop, make the background black.  Use one off camera light source and a speedlight with a orange gel over it to balance the colour of the light (or more specifically the temperature of the light).  Bingo, you get this shot.

Now, I will give you that this is not the shot that Bob was looking for.  I will also say that I probably would have received an F, or an incomplete on this particular shot.  But it sure is a heck of a lot better looking than the original shot of the diet coke can!  :-)