Reflections on Reflection

 

This is a quick post to help you better understand reflection as it relates to product photography.  We all want to get cool shots of our reels and gadgets for various reasons.  Maybe it’s for a quick post on the internet or maybe you need to showcase a product you built yourself.  If you are lucky you might have a acquired an new or even antique reel that you want to showcase.  By following a few basic photography principles and knowing a bit about light reflection you can better compose your shots.

First, let’s look at a very informative picture provided by David Briggs http://www.huevaluechroma.com/index.php. This is one of the most important teaching tools I stumbled across when starting out and I printed this out and literally taped it to my studio for about three months.  This is art and photography 101.  Learn about each topic on the image and then practice as much as it takes until you can not only recognize each of these in your own images but be able to recreate it using a fly or reel/rod in place of the cue ball. For example, look at the metal bead head in the photograph following the cue ball image; can you map out these elements on the bead? They are all there – rounded metal on flies or reels or rods is like a microscope into what the photographer was doing at the time of the shot.  You will notice that the photographer used three flash light sources.

 http://www.huevaluechroma.com/index.php

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