What is Subject Photography?
Subject photography is a type of professional photography when it is necessary to obtain an image of any objects for further use of these images for advertising purposes. The result of object shooting largely depends on the professionalism of the photographer, the equipment used and further processing. Product photography is a rather narrow niche in photography, and not every professional photographer can cope with this task. This is due to several reasons at once, so when choosing a photographer, it is better to trust someone who specializes in product photography.
Features of Subject Shooting
Product photography is very different from other types of photography, such as wedding or reportage photography, portrait photography, and other types of photo shoots. When shooting portraits, it is important to show a person better than he really is, enhancing the strengths and hiding the flaws. When shooting wedding photography, it is also important to emphasize beauty and hide imperfections, but at the same time, it is also important to catch interesting moments, without which the photo session will be boring. When shooting reportage, it is important to be able to tell a story without missing important moments in photographs. Product photography is very different from this - there is no living object with which the photographer can interact. On the one hand, this makes it possible to take photographs without fear that the subject will do something wrong and ruin the frame. And at the same time, all actions to manipulate the subject have to be done by the photographer himself or his assistant.
Subject Shooting Equipment
To perform subject shooting, the studio must be equipped with a lot of additional equipment. If in most cases a professional photographer, even working in a studio, only needs a camera with a set of lenses, a tripod, a set of backgrounds and flashing light, then a specialist in product photography needs much more photographic equipment. Since objects do not move on their own during subject shooting, this makes it possible to use both pulsed and constant lighting, but in any case it should be diffused light obtained using soft boxes and not giving a shadow. To shoot objects with glossy or mirror surfaces, you need a so-called light box - a camera made of transparent fabric, when shooting inside of which the surroundings are not reflected on shiny surfaces. To make a series of shots that show the subject from all sides, you may need a turntable that automatically rotates the subject at a given angle at specified time intervals. Various reflectors and diffusers, point light sources and chemicals for cleaning the surface of objects from dust and dirt, background holders, light sources, reflectors and the objects themselves - you can’t list everything.
Macro Photography
One of the types of subject photography is macro photography. This type of shooting is used when you need to get high-quality images of small or very small objects. To do this, there are specialized lenses that allow you to shoot objects at a scale of 1:1 or even with an increase. But in this case, not only the object becomes clearly visible, but also all its defects that were not visible to the naked eye. Therefore, macro shooting requires both preliminary cleaning of objects from dust and other things, and subsequent retouching. If dust can still be dealt with somehow by excluding retouching, then in case of defects in the product itself, retouching cannot be dispensed with in any way. Another problem with macro photography is the shallow depth of field, which can be only a few millimeters, which is clearly not enough for a high-quality image of the subject. This problem is solved by using special lenses that allow you to rotate the plane of the sharply depicted space, cameras with a small sensor size that give a slightly greater depth of field, or using stacking, when one is obtained from a series of photographs with a shallow depth of field, where the subject is completely in focus.
Do You Need Subject Photography?
Do you need subject photography? Strange, at first glance, the question, but it has a certain meaning. Before ordering the shooting of certain subjects, it is necessary to explore the possibility of an alternative way of obtaining images. This path is 3D modeling, which allows you to get images of any size and quality that are superior in quality to photographs of real objects. 3D modeling is particularly well suited for imaging various industrial products. Of course, first you need to calculate the budget for photography and evaluate the quality of the expected images and compare this with the cost of 3D modeling and its results. In some cases, it is better to use subject photography, and in others, the services of a 3D modeling specialist.