Apple Photographer Details the Process of Capturing Product Photos

[bertman]

This guy is hilarious. Does he have no idea that his photos get taken to the agency and worked on in photoshop for days after he is "done". They get cleaned up, screens added, textures redone, hi-lights painted, glass cleaned, lighting fixed, logos reimported from vector art, etc, etc...

Ja, he is SO CLUELESS!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqC2xpCaG80

Or --- someone else is.

 

[evangw]

oops wrong post. thought i could delete posts if within 5 minutes or something..

 

[Larry-K]

Ah so he uses Canon. Great choice! Canon is far better than Nikon!

Tell it to my Big Fat Wallet.

 

[Larry-K]

Adams was a true photographer in that he was able to capture a scene and present it at it's best without artificially adding or deleting things that were or weren't there in the first place.

I think you're seeing the terms 'photoshop', 'illistrator', 'photography', and 'photographer' as the same thing. A photographer has the knowledge and ability to capture the escence of a scene. Photography provides tools to do it. Photoshop is an illustration tool used as a tool to create or turn a scene into something that never existed. There's nothing wrong with Photoshop (other than the new liscensing plan). It creates a lot of great looking images, but these images are being created by an 'illistrator', not a 'photographer'. When you put down your camera and launch Photoshop, you switch from being a photographer to being an illustrator.

Not true at all.

Photoshop is not just an illustration tool. You can adjust color and contrast in a myriad of ways and generate color separations for any number of applications without ever actually illustrating anything. You may be trying to match colors of actual products more accurately than the capture device is capable of it, or distort those colors to display better under different conditions. Even this is one small segment of preparing images for commercial use.

You can no more say Photoshop is an illustration tool than you can say it's a texture mapping tool, or a lettering tool, or a dozen other tools, it's what you make of it.

The term "Photo Illustration" was around a long time before Photoshop, and people recognized that simply snapping a shutter didn't tell the story. Virtually all commercial photography has used some sort of image manipulation since its inception.

Ansel Adams work is the epitome of artificiality, for him, the negative was only the beginning and the darkroom was where he made his images unique. He may not have added or deleted anything, technically speaking, but he was very selective in the enhancements he made, attenuating and exaggerating as he saw fit.

All perception is subjective, it's a matter of how you must work within its constraints. The "truth" in art is rarely based on verisimilitude.

 

[BoomerAppleseed]

Precision

I had my share of product photoshoots in my career but never witnessed so much efforts to get the 'ultimate' perfect lighting. Just amazing.

 

[thermodynamic]

What, the photos aren't taken on iPads, iPhones, or FaceTime?

But in seriousness, he's come up with some great stuff.

My only nitpick is the faux light glare bouncing off the simulated screen for some of the renderings. Anyone using these things in real life, even the TVs with the same flare, would be quite annoyed over any reflection.

----------

a true photographer wants to show the image as he sees it, not the original image. Trust me, you don't want to show someone your raw files. Never.

**bingo**

 

[barmann]

Because there's no real advantage to a prime in controlled studio conditions. Most likely his aperture is such where he's using the sweet spot of the lenses he chooses. He doesn't need or want a wide open aperture, either. And most lenses look very very similar at f8 in quality.

I think that's my favourite comment .

Of course Belanger is using a Sinar and a Phase DB for the shots, and his aperture is probably somewhere around f16 , I guess .

The Canon just got highlighted in the article so more people can relate to it, it's the product photographer's P&S camera .

I like his shots, simple but spot on, good stuff.
And yes, I am another pro photographer .

Just for the record, CGI is actually a lot more expensive to get the same kind of quality, and Photoshop retouching is very different from 3D lighting and texturing .

It's a commom misconception that anything that can be done with software is cheaper than shooting; it's the other way around - if good quality is required .

 

[Larry-K]

I think that's my favourite comment .
Of course Belanger is using a Sinar and a Phase DB for the shots, and his aperture is probably somewhere around f16 , I guess .

The Canon just got highlighted in the article so more people can relate to it, it's the product photographer's P&S camera .

I like his shots, simple but spot on, good stuff.
And yes, I am another pro photographer .

Just for the record, CGI is actually a lot more expensive to get the same kind of quality, and Photoshop retouching is very different from 3D lighting and texturing .

It's a commom misconception that anything that can be done with software is cheaper than shooting; it's the other way around - if good quality is required .

Yeah, that "We'll fix it in post" attitude is all too prevalent these days.

I spent most of Friday trying to fix a shot somebody did with a Sinar and their eMotion 75 Back. I can only speculate that the guy using it had more money than sense, because virtually every aspect of the photo was a disaster, especially the lighting.

I wish I'd had someone around to tell me "just use f8" when I was shooting on an 8x10.

It may look easy...