Photographers at Work. Product Photography. Studio Photography of Jewellery and Watches.

There are a lot of product / still life photographers, and the quality, style and feel of the work varies. Paul Hartley photographs jewellery and watches and makes the products look a million dollars, and even though he has 30 years experience as a professional photographer he says, ‘like to think I’m always learning’. Paul offers an insight into his lighting, photographic kit and digital post production:

‘Starting with the lighting I use Elinchrom. Mostly Style 300s units (because they power down to small outputs), a couple of 600’s and a couple of RX1200 digital packs and various heads and boxlights. All the big stuff I used to own went over the last couple/three years. At one point I had over 20,000 joules of flash power, now it’s small and very controlable and very consistent from one flash to the next. Continuous lighting would be just too hot at the distances I work at.’

‘I have had an enormous churn in my camera gear in the past ten years. Out went the Sinar 10×8 and 5×4, out went the schneider symmars (large format lenses), out went the Mamiya RZ kit, out went the Nikon film bodies.’

‘The Sinars had to go because in the beginning Sinar took so long to actually get the digital thing. They were lazy and thought you could use a digital back on a P or P2, which of course you can but the experience is poor. I bought a Rollei xAct II at first with Apo Macro digitar lenses in their electronic shutters and mostly use the 80mm & 120mm.’

‘Then I bought Horseman digitar bodies to shoot the stuff that doesn’t need the full swings and tilts of the Rollei. They are much quicker to use than the view camera and I have 60mm, 105mm and 200mm Nikon macros plus an 85mm shift tilt which is perhaps my main lens on that platform.’

‘The digital bit is Phase One. I’ve got a Lightphase (6m pixel), a H10 (11m pixel) and a P45 (39m pixel) all in a Hasselblad V fitting. Any of the backs can be used on either the Rollei or the Horseman.’

‘The Hasselblad fitting is now a cul-de-sac and it’s only a matter of time till support for it dries up. So with that in mind, I’ve just bought a Mamiya AFD II 645 and fitted it with a P20 back (16m pixel) and mounted the whole thing on a Cambo X2 Pro. It works well, and is an unusual and very effective camera. Mamiya have just announced their new AFD II along with a Phase one version and I think this is going to be the pivotal platform for medium format for the next ten years now that Hasselblad have closed their system.’

‘All the raw processing is through Capture One and then processed into Photoshop CS3 where the images are cut out, layered and cleaned, colour adjusted and saved as PSD (Photoshop) master files. Tom, my retoucher, does all that part for me, as the time fixing the images is as long as capturing them. There is no software made that can cut out jewellery so it’s done by hand, drawing paths round each item. One of my brochures has nearly 1000 items so you can imagine that work flow is important.’

‘Everything at this end is Mac, on quad Intel 3 Ghz Mac Pros with 9 gigs of ram and 10,000 rpm Raptor drives for the tethered captures. Remember it’s 44mb of compressed raw data every time the shutter’s pressed with the P45. The monitors are 26” NEC Spectraviews calibrated with a (Gretag) Eye One.’

I think Paul’s words will offer some food for thought to those photographers keen on product photography. It is an expensive process aiming to do high end photography. With the larger digital files from digital cameras comes the expense of more powerful computers and processing power. Learning the photographic skills is one endeavour, alongside that is the power of post production with Photoshop. Paul states it takes as long on post production as it does in the studio. There’s a thought when stating the importance of post production to a client.

~ by bip mistry on April 6, 2008.