This week we decided to shoot “Gear”.  By gear we mean camera equipment.  The idea is you can shoot anything to do with photography, be it lights, lenses or even a camera.  This worked well for me as I needed to shoot one of my older cameras as I’m putting it up for sale.

For the set up I wanted to shoot my best camera (not posting the one I’m selling here), on a white “infinity” background.  An infinity background is basically something white that goes along the floor and then up the wall.  Ideally where the floor meets the wall it’s curved, so it doesn’t look like a sharp corner.  This way what ever is standing on the floor is backed by a seamless background.

While this sounds complicated it’s actually pretty easy to do.  I got some white paper and placed it on the table.  I then curved the back of the paper up to create a little infinity wall.

I then plopped the camera on the paper and got some lights out.  First I fired two lights (one on either side of the camera) through umbrellas.  This lit the camera really well but you could see the spines of the left umbrella reflected in the lens.  So I got a large portable reflector that that also acted as a big diffusor and put that in front of the umbrella to the left of the camera.  Then the spines disappeared and the lens looked great.

My first attempt came out really well and is the first image I’m posting below.

While this is a great gear shot, it’s not “that” interesting.  I wanted to come up with something a little more creative.  So I put some lights on the table next to the camera and set both lights to fire when they saw another flash go off.  By doing this the lights would fire when I took the shot.

I had no idea what this would look like but I really liked the shot, so this week I’m posting two images.