Shoe Photography

[timbobalob]

Hi all,

I'm hoping that people can steer me in the right direction...

I work for a shoe company, making high end ladies footwear. I need to get all of our shoes photographed, in 1500x1500 high res format, primarily for web use (but also good enough for POS).

As a rule, the company doesn't produce it's own so I need to either find someone who can do them fairly cheaply and regularly (every couple of months) or to buy some equipment to do myself. Total quantity every season (twice a year) would be around 400 shoes. All of the images need to be on a white background (example below)




The challenge also comes from giving a good representation of black suede, which seems to suck the light out the image. Below is a good example of it being done well




The guy who took these did a great job, but unfortunately the long term cost is far too high.

So what I guess I'm trying to ask is what in your opinion would be the best way to acheive this?

• Own equipment (if so what would I need)

• Hire someone (it still needs to be cost effective in the long term)

If the latter, is there anyone local to Northampton who could give a cost? Feel free to email me through my profile if you'd rather.

Thanks for reading!

Tim

[Scott330ci]

Hire someone.

[MartinP]

Scott330ci said:

Hire someone.

^^^ what he said.

Unless you want to spend a great deal of money buying kit and lots of time working out how to use it, just find a local photographer that does product shots. He/she would easily be able to pump out a couple of hundred shots like that in a day for you. It will be so much cheaper than buying the kit.

[Ed_P]

Just happened that these were killing me, so took them off and did a quick shot!


Shoe_740 by Ed Phillips 01, on Flickr

Edited by ThatPhilBrettGuy on Thursday 28th October 15:31

Edited by Ed_P on Monday 1st November 10:58

[andy-xr]

Bread and Butter business for someone like Simpo Two I'd have thought

(Other PHers may be appropriate as well)

[timbobalob]

Great stuff - cheers for the help so far

Ed - YHM

[S. Gonzales Esq.]

PM sent.

[Simpo Two]

andy-xr said:

Bread and Butter business for someone like Simpo Two I'd have thought

Thanks Andy, yes, this is exactly the sort of thing I do - in fact this afternoon a happy PHer popped in to retrieve his products and pick up a disk containing full-size and resized images for his company's website

[AndWhyNot]

If all you'll ever need is shoes on an infinite white background pay a pro to spec your equipment; set it up for you in the first instance; and write an idiots guide. Then get the office junior to stage and fire off the shots as and when you need.

If there's any chance of needing shots other than plain white bg then it's a permanent outside job.

[Wheelrepairit]

Simpo Two said:

Thanks Andy, yes, this is exactly the sort of thing I do - in fact this afternoon a happy GOOD LOOKING PHer popped in to retrieve his products and pick up a disk containing full-size and resized images for his company's website

EFA, thats more like it.

OP, Simpo Two is your man, he has just photographed almost 100 items for my new website, very pleased with finished pictures, nice bloke,helpful,happy with prices, all round good egg.

Will be using his services for all my product pics in the future.

Take a look at www.alloypaints.com to see his work, the pics with "blue" background are the ones he did, ive not got round to uploading them all yet.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask away, either on here or via pm.

[RobDickinson]

To 'have a go' yourself you'd need something like this:

An SLR, doesn't have to be new or flash. (£300-500 +)
A decent prime lens, preferably a macro but not needed as such for shoes. (£150-700)
A light tent (£20-50)
2-3 lamps with daylight bulbs ( £100?)
White balance card
A tripod and head(£200), and remote release but best shot tethered.

The trick is getting the white balance set right and the light level, the exposure shouldn't then change for different shoes.

Then there's processing the shots correctly for professional web use, not as easy as it sounds.


Theres all sorts of tricks and kit to help out more and I'm guessing Simpo will use a different setup ( studio lights and infinity backgrouind or something, and a top end camera/lens).

[Simpo Two]

RobDickinson said:

To 'have a go' yourself you'd need something like this:

An SLR, doesn't have to be new or flash. (£300-500 +)
A decent prime lens, preferably a macro but not needed as such for shoes. (£150-700)
A light tent (£20-50)
2-3 lamps with daylight bulbs ( £100?)
White balance card
A tripod and head(£200), and remote release but best shot tethered.

The trick is getting the white balance set right and the light level, the exposure shouldn't then change for different shoes.

Then there's processing the shots correctly for professional web use, not as easy as it sounds.


Theres all sorts of tricks and kit to help out more and I'm guessing Simpo will use a different setup ( studio lights and infinity backgrouind or something, and a top end camera/lens).

Pretty much except I use a trusty D200 set to manual exposure and ISO 100. Lenses can be anything from 105mm Micro Nikkor to 17-55mm f2.8 Nikkor.

I would just point out that there's rather more to studio photography than the 'one size fits all' setup proposed by AndWhyNot, and in the same vein, a light tent. That's fine for eBay, but objects differ in reflectivity, shape and every other factor, and anything really reflective can be a right sod because you have to light the studio behind the camera too. If you want the best results, you have to put the time in and you need a certain level of equipment. Not so much megabucks cameras - the camera is only recording the light you throw in the front - but controllable lighting and modifiers so you can control shadows and reflections. But it makes a nice change from weddings as the objects don't move about.

Well most of them don't!

[timbobalob]

Hi all,

Thanks again to all for your help, and to the kind folk who emailed me.

Just to keep everyone in the picture (does that count as a pun on here?!) we've postponed the project until the beginning of next year so I'll be able give a proper update then

Cheers,

Tim