Behind the Scenes

When looking at an image, we almost never stop and think about how it was set-up and shot. We just look at the image as a whole. Therefore, I decided to give you a little “behind the scenes” of a commercial shoot!

As one of our lessons and projects, we learned how to light and shoot metal objects. These type of objects require special lighting techniques because of their reflective surface. Following the lesson, we each had to shoot a different kitchen utensil for our assignment. Normally, we would receive a set of instruction, follow them, find a subject, figure out how to place it for the shot and so on. This time, everything was pre-determined, along with a sketch of what the final image had to look like. This is usually how a real commercial job would work, so it was nice to experience this!

After setting up for the shoot and once I was done, I decided to take a few set-up shots of my studio. If you read and saw my “still life: three pears” post, I explained that it took around 3 hours for that single shot. Same goes for this one! Maybe this post will explain visually a bit more why it sometime takes a little longer than what we would think!

Here is the final image, followed by two different views of the studio set-up.

As you can see, there is a lot involved to get this one image, not including the time spent on the computer afterwards.  I hope you enjoyed this little behind the scenes of a commercial shoot! Make sure you stop by often, as I’ll be posting some more projects soon!