Attempts at Product Photography with a Fukubukuro
As a freelancer I am always thinking about news ways to improve my photography so I can find different types of jobs and earn more money. It’s also true that trying out different disciplines of photography will help you with what you already shoot. Afterall, photography is all about understanding light. I’ve never done any kind of real studio photography, but for a little while now I’ve wanted to have a go at improving my flash photography. Just how do they create all those product images we see online? Handily for Christmas I got a copy of Nath Sakura’s excellent book Product Photography: Lighting, Composition, and Shooting Techniques and as soon as I opened it I knew it was going to be gold. One of the great things about Covid is that so many experts had time to finally write that book they always wanted to write, and now we can reap the benefits.
Even if you don’t intend to do a lot of product photography it is well worth picking up a copy as it goes into great detail in the impact of light with clear illustrations. I was certainly very keen to have a go and get started and with a good bit of timing the perfect subject(s) fell into my lap. Fukubukuro, or as we would say in English, lucky bags. While Christmas is the most major winter holiday in in the Western world, New Year is the most important in Japan. At this time companies across the country offer Fukubukuro to keen customers, which are essentially large lucky dip bags for adults. A random assortment of items of a particular theme are placed in a sealed bag and sold for less than the sum total of their contents. Part of the excitement is simply the anticipation of seeing what you will get.
While not a tradition in the UK, Japan House London sells a limited number in early January of each year. On offer were three options - small, medium and large and I opted to pick up a small one. In mine was a small Daruma doll, a kanji bookmark, a furoshiki, two post cards from the previous WAVE exhibition and a mizuhiki pin badge (and of course the cloth sack itself and a thank you card from Japan House London). Time to assemble everything and have a go in my own pop-up studio.
For a little while now I have been collecting large pieces of white polystyrene for this very purpose, a convenient no cost solution. I placed myself near a window just to see the difference between natural light and flash, but my finished set up was with two strobes. One in a softbox directly behind the subjects to create a bright white background, the other off to 45° angled from above with a shoot through umbrella as my key light. The previous day I’d put together a list of different images I want to shoot, putting some thought into how I wanted everything to be arranged, which is almost as important as the lighting itself. With each object being very different in size and shape this proved to be a challenge.
I needed a ‘group’ shot of all the contents and then individual shots of each item. I was initially unsure how to photograph the furoshiki, as it is essentially a very large handkerchief, but I ultimately decided to utilise it in three different ways. Firstly, as the underlying structure of the entire contents photo, then with a close-up of the fabric details and finally used as intended to wrap something. My knots certainly need some more practice for the sake of elegance.
I definitely learned a lot through doing this. My initial lighting set-up was fairly decent but having a third light on the other (left) side as a kicker would have almost certainly given my images more dimension. Unfortunately, I don’t really have the space to accommodate that. I did also try to use my imagination to make the arrangements as interesting as possible, though they were scruffy. There’s a lot of easy things I could have done like making sure the furoshiki was lying flat, so as not to leave large ugly shadows underneath.
One of the principal warnings from the book were that if you get things wrong while shooting you may end up spending hours in postproduction painstakingly correcting every minor mistake. I certainly got a taste of that. My main issue was the texture of the polystyrene. I had thought, almost correctly, that with overexposure I could wash out all the texture and leave my object sitting on a smooth, pure white surface. However, when backlit the object cast just enough of a shadow in front to cause the texture to come through. I made an effort to brighten the foreground to eliminate this when editing, however this also meant I started to lose the very slight shadow around the base which gives the object dimensionality. Otherwise, it just looks like it’s floating in a sea of white. Solving one problem by creating another.
When dealing with the larger scene of all the objects I also realised that I simply didn’t have enough workspace to accommodate it, and there was very little surface area in front before you can see the edge of the polystyrene, coupled with huge amounts of headspace and the photo is completely unbalanced. A bit of cropping and cloning helped overcome this, but if I tried to offer this to a client I would be laughed out of the room. Next time I definitely need a larger, smooth, white surface to work on to just save me all that hassle from the get-go.
The last major thing I realised when editing is that some of the tiny gold wrap on the mizuhiki pin badge was actually damaged, something I missed it at the time of shooting. Perhaps that was due to a handling error, or perhaps it was like that when it arrived, I’m not sure. In this instance I didn’t try to edit it out but if I had been paid then I would have had no choice but to painfully recreate it with photoshop. I certainly have a lot more respect for product photographers, it really pays to get it right first time.
I am sure there’s plenty more I got wrong that I haven’t even noticed but it’s a good start on my journey of understanding. I will certainly be reading more of that book and practicing as a I go along. As ever, the more mistakes I make, the faster I will learn and hopefully it won’t take my that long to overcome the obvious ones.
You can learn more about Japan House London by clicking here.
If you have any comments, questions or tips on product photography then I look forward to reading them in the comments section down below.