Calling all Photographers....In house product photography studio help
 

I know most people concentrate on adult but I am sure most of the top guys have the skills to produce top level product photography as well.

I am interested in building an inhouse studio that concentrates on product photography. I run a few mainstream e-commerce sites and we want to start bringing in the photography in hose.

What I need is the opinions and suggestions of you pros for the list of goodies I need to buy to get optimal results.

Here are a few questions I have but please feel free to add in points that I missed. I am not the expert here, you are :)

1. What Digital Camera should we get? Are there any cameras that are more favorable in product photography?

2. Lighting?

3. Seamless?

4. Stands? Table top?

5. Photoshop plugins?

6. Software filters etc.

I also want to be able to view on a large LCD or monitoe in real time as we are shooting so we can make adjustments on the fly. What software/hardware do we need for this?

Thanks,

Spankstrocko

it's hard to reccommend what to buy when we don't know the product you are shooting - I am guessing dildos or something - probably should hire a pro photographer and watch what he uses - if you like the look - buy similar equipment - you wont get the same look from every shooter - find someone you like and hire them - watch and learn - take it from there - or - buy a book and use the lighting diagrams to build your kit.

The items we need shot are shoes and clothes.

Thanks for the tips so far.

Spankstrocko

to shoot shoes and clothes you really need a good light tent and a small lighting system for it. We use a light tent to shoot jewerly and small objects in. We use a canon d10 and a olympus e20 camera to do all our shoots, and we feed these back to a Sharp High rez 15"flat panel to watch quality. It is very expensive to setup a good studio, but if all your doing is shoes and clothes it shouldnt cost more than 5 grand or so

shooting shoes is quite complicated thing as it lets say small thing so you need to use right Macro flash system etc - not so easy.I am not sure how many guys here can do such a thing

forget about shooting this using Oly E20 or D10 - you need some Hasselblad , mamya or sinar using some large CCD (I think sinarback released 90mpix some time ago but ok its extrem)

What result are you looking for? If strictly web, any 6MP SLR will do. If you need posters, you probably have to stick to film.

You don't ask about lenses.... are you in over your head?

For lighting you may want to consider hot lights so you see what you will get. But you better understand white balance.

And for product you better be using a colour card for calibration.

Creative may be very important. Why do you want a shadow or a prop? What do you want the observer to experience?

And get it right when you shoot. Don't rely on post production to make the photographs suitable.

Good luck.