I do a lot of product work and getting the lighting right is always a challenge because different types of objects will reflect light differently. A very dark object may need a lot more light on it to pull out the detail where a shiny object may cause you all kinds of grief with reflections. Often, getting things just right is just a matter of trial and error, but starting with a decent setup can save you tons of work later. Today we will dissect a recent product shoot and see why I decided to use flash heads.

Summary
I most often work with constant lights because I can turn them on and adjust the lights until I get the exact lighting that I want. However, for this shoot, I had several things working against me. First off, I was working in my home office which is very cramped for space, not enjoyable when working with hot lights. Second, the product had a plastic bezel and metal case, the two were not reflecting light the same so I was having trouble color matching. Third and most importantly, it was hot, I mean really hot, it was 91 degrees with high humidity, and the hot lights are exactly that..HOT. I use two 500w bulbs and 1 100w backlight and not only was I sweating like crazy but just as I got everything setup, we started having brownouts. Not wanting to risk blowing out a bulb and not wanting to suffer under the heat, it was time to move to flashes. The advantages of using strobes in this situation include:

• MUCH cooler operation
• Different color temperature on this item worked better for color matching
• 2 of the three strobes are battery operated so less to worry about with the power brownouts

The Setup
The new strobe lighting setup included the following:

• SL-150 Strobe for key light on lightstand pointing into a silver umbrella
• Quantaray QB6500A flash for fill light on lightstand pointing into a gray umbrella
• Olympus FL-50 flash on lightstand for background light overhead with Gary Fong Lightsphere

The SL-150 and QB6500A were fired using Cactus remotes while the FL-50 was using an optical slave adapter. The SL-150 was set to about 3/4 power while the QB6500A and FL-50 were set to 1/8^th power. The product was sitting on thick plexiglass on top of white muslin to achieve the reflection look the client wanted.

Here is a shot of the lighting setup with a test item on the table. You can see the two front lights are angled at about a 45 degree angle away from the camera. The background light is positioned behind the product by a few feet so most of the light will go onto the background.

While the out-of-camera result will be really good, you may end up with a line across the image where the plexiglass ends, you will need to edit that out in a photo editing program, other than that, very little work should be needed if the exposure is right. Kick up the exposure as high as you can without loosing any detail as this will help blow out any wrinkles in the muslin.

Results
This setup works very well for a quick lighting setup that not only gives fantastic results, but doesn’t require its own air conditioner during the summer. The other advantage of using flash heads is that if they are all battery powered, then this setup is completely portable and can be used even if you have no electrical power. If you are looking for inexpensive but high quality flash heads, check out the Vivitar 285HV available from Gadget Infinity.

This shows that you don’t need to spend tons of money on high-end lighting gear in order to get really good results.

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