First "Studio" Work -- DJ Product Shoot

Hey Everyone,

My friend who's a DJ asked me to do a quick photoshoot for some pinnies that he's trying to sell on his site. I've never done anything like this but he said he just wanted something to show on his site and he's used me for shoots at events. I tried to reserve our campus (Lehigh) studio for the shoot, but he forgot to tell me that he needed them the next day. I wasn't able to get such a last minute slot so I had to improvise.

I set up a makeshift studio in the residence hall where I'm living now using two video lights (unknown brand, they were just lights hanging around my office) and a 380ex triggered by a Cactus V4 trigger. I was having some problems using the 380ex with the cactus because it was firing every time at full power, since it's full auto, but I thought of a way to put that to good use. I placed it on a gorrilapod on the floor and pointed it straight up at the ceiling very close to the wall, and used a flashbender to aim the light at the face of the wall. I thought this would burn out the wall, creating a fairly uniform background while the two video lights provided some lighting from the front. I knew he would be underexposed, but figured the lighting would be even enough to boost in lightroom afterwards.

For the most part, I'm happy with how it turned out, and so is he. Only two issues I ran into were the mirrored sunglasses' (totally blanked on that one) reflection and some overexposure around the edges, especially on the hands. Here's the set up and results.

1. Setup

IMAGE LINK: http://farm7.static.fl​ickr.com …28696308_8415a4​20cb_b.jpg

IMAGE LINK: http://farm7.static.fl​ickr.com …28696822_2d14a4​661b_b.jpg

Ive done a similar thing many times...
I assume you would clone out the outlet?

and it bothers me with his hand in his pocket. I keep thinking he is an amputee.

Way to be resourceful. The more equipment I get, the less I tend to push my thinking out of the box.

I actually tried to position him for the most part so that he would be blocking the outlet and flashbender. But yea, boosted the exposure to get the white pretty much uniform and cloned out whatever was left.

And if I look at his left hand and let my eyes relax a bit I totally see where the amputee thing comes in. Wow that's freaky. Now I can't stop seeing that!