My first technical problem I found was when it came to doing my first photography shoot in the studio. I was experimenting with lighting and positioning of the products and the first problem that occurred was extremely dark shadows from the spotlights. I tried re-arranging the lights and the products so that the lights were directly above, in front and behind the products to reduce shadow however, the same problem still occurred and that was the harsh shadows around the products. The solution to this problem was to ask Lee Gavin; one of my media tutors for help as I have not done much photography before so I did not know how to solve this problem. He showed me how to use the big box lights on the tracks in the studio and he showed me what settings the camera should be on, what the aperture, shutter speed, ISO and other settings are and how I would change them for the look I want to get and the positioning of the lights. Once experimenting with the information he gave me on the camera settings, I found that the ISO worked best on 100 with the sensitivity controls off, the aperture at f13, the shutter speed at 125. The white balance was on auto white balance, the file size was large and the quality of the images were fine. I put the products on a table with a white plastic backdrop and I had two box studio lights, one at the front of the product and one t the back behind the back drop to eliminate shadows. I used a hot shoe adapter and connected it to the light at the front and the lights was both on f9.0. This worked for me as I no longer had harsh shadows, a grey background or a black line going across the images. I made sure to take pictures of these changes I made for my next shoot as they fixed my problems.
If these settings and camera adjustments did not work and the images were still dark, had black lines across them and had harsh shadows then I would have looked on youtube at different videos and tutorials of how else I may photograph products. I have seen plenty of youtube videos out there showing you different camera adjustments and setups which I could have potentially tried if my experiments did not work.
As you can see by this image, the image is very under exposed, it has harsh shadows, it is not very in focus, the subject is too far away and it has a yellow tint to it. This image was taken at the very beginning of the shoot before my camera adjustments.
This photo was one of my next photos I had taken after the extremely under exposed image. When experimenting with the settings, I may have experimented a little too far to the point where the image is nearly all white and over exposed where you cannot see the main subject. This is okay as again I was just testing my camera settings. It meant that I needed to lower my ISO to 100 and make my aperture number higher.
I made my aperture higher and made my ISO to 100 but I was still not satisfied with the orange tint and the shadowing to the image. The main subject may not be in focus or in the centre of the frame because I was just testing the settings so this really didn't matter at this point. I began experimenting with my shutter speed and I began making my white balance set to direct sunlight as I was using spotlights at the time and this made the orange tint go away.
After changing my white balance to make the image temperature cooler, I began getting a black line across the bottom of the image. This was because my ISO had been changed to a high number and because I was still using multiple spotlights instead of softboxes.
This is one of my final images. Finally, I used two lights only with soft-boxes on with the lights on aperture f9.o and a hot show adapter connected to the light at the front making it flash as the picture is taken. This allowed more brightness to come in, it eliminated nearly all shadows and it made the image softer. It brung the colour out in the bath bombs and the lower ISO made the black line on the image go away. This is how I resolved my problems throughout my first photoshoot. I made sure to record my camera and lighting positions and camera settings to feedforward for my next shoots incase these problems occurred once again.
The next problem I ended up coming across with my project, is the designated timeframe and the amount of work I had to do to get my business up and running efficiently. Because I have to set up a business Instagram page, a business Facebook page, a online shop, I have to do multiple photo-shoots, edit the photographs and upload on the social medias as well as researching and paper work, I found it extremely challenging to fit everything in within such little time I had for the project. To manage this, I kept to my daily log that I created and I reflect every single day of my daily log to make sure I am on track with my work for finish within the designated deadline. This just meant that the final products such as the social media pages and online shop, are not as clear, full up and organised as I would of liked.
Another problem I had was lack of equipment at home. I have a very beginner and limited camera to take photographs, no lights, a cheap tripod and that is it. So, I purchased plain black and white material in the material shop in Chatham Pentagon, this allowed me to create my own backdrops using the materials and tape, I then purchased mini photo studio boxes on eBay that allowed me to hang the materials in to look like their is no background. In terms of lighting, I used natural lighting on a sunny but cloudy day as the clouds acted as a diffuser. On a bright sunny day, I photographed the products in the light box near a window and I hung another piece of material up the window which also acts as a diffuser. I could have done this with a clean bed sheet if I had no material left. This allowed me to create my own photo studio at home when I could not get in the Photo Studio at college.
At the very end of my project, the last few screen recordings I did to show my editing within Photoshop and Premiere Pro, would not save. I used Quicktime player to record my screens as I have a Macbook Pro but once I had finished the screen recording, it did not end up saving. I tried adding it into Photos, I tried exporting it straight into YouTube as that was an option, I tried saving it as a MOV where I could of then changed it to mp4, I tried exporting the file as a 1080p, 720p and 480p and I then tried saving it within quicktime and everything failed. I did not know what else to do as I have never come across this problem before, it did not give me a reason for not saving, it just said cannot open when I tried expoRting the screen recording. I then cleared a lot of memory and data from my laptop in case this was the reason why, and it still said cannot open. My only thought it might be is because the screen recording is so long. I think the screen recording was around 23 minutes so this may have been the problem.
This just means I cannot make a time-lapse and show my exact method of editing my photos, new techniques I have learnt and put into practice or record my editing techniques for future references.
For next time, i will try to make multiple shorter screen recordings than big long ones.
To conclude, although I had many problems with the camera settings and equipment, I managed to solve nearly all of my problems in a cheap why by finding out tips and tricks from YouTube, experimenting with the camera setting myself, and putting a daily log in place that I was able to stick with so I know I would be able to finish my project within the designated timeframe.
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