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I’ve been pretty excited these past couple of weeks, as I’ve had a chance to do try some photography that I’ve been wanting to do for a while. Now that I have a dedicated space for working (more on that later), I’ve been crossing off items from my to-do list.

After shooting some beauty images with my new do-it-yourself triflector, I decided to tackle some product photography. But with there being an unlimited selection of products to photograph, I knew I wanted to photograph something that was a little unique and not something you see every day. My girlfriend used to play paintball and she still knows a lot of people in the industry, including her brother. I thought about the gear they use and I find some of it to be quite colourful and aesthetic, so I chose paintball as my theme.

There are a lot of different products and gear associated with paintball, but I decided to narrow my items list down to just a couple for now. I spent a few hours photographing some goggles and other pieces of hardware, but the most challenging (and the most fun) was shooting a gun (pun intended). This is a brand new Eclipse Ego 11 and it looks pretty damn awesome (this one has the Regal purple and gold colour scheme). For this, I really wanted to play around with capturing the reflection of the gun. I used a small piece of plexiglass that I had picked up prior to the shoot and placed it on the floor over my white seamless paper. The trick, however, is finding the right angle to shoot at. Sure you can just lay the product on the floor and shoot it from above, but that’s so… boring, and you don’t really get a nice reflection. You also have to watch the shadow of the product and ensure that the reflection and the shadow do not converge.

As you can see in the two images I posted, the gun appears to be floating. This was my goal and to achieve it, I had to use a couple of different objects, such as my assistant’s hand and some various small objects from around the studio. I wanted the gun to appear as though it were floating in space to help add a bit of creativity to the shots. I want people to look at the image and go, “Oh, it’s not just a photo of a product on the floor”. The unfortunate result was that I had to remove those supports in Photoshop afterwards. Lesson learned though. Now that I’ve done it once, my mind is already filled with other ideas for making these styles of shots easier to accomplish.

As for the final images, I’m quite pleased with the results I captured, but am undecided on which I like better. The image with the strong reflection or the image with the shadow? The reflection looks cool because you can see the underside of the gun, but the image with the shadow displays the gun much better.

So, which photo do you like better?

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