Product Photo with Modest Tools but Pleasing Result

Earlier today, I was screwing with my 50D coupled with my cheapo EF-S 55-250mm IS to shoot some "product photo" of my two other lenses, the favourite EF 28mm f/1.8 USM and the rookie EF 50mm f/1.8 II. I decided to do it today, because tomorrow, I plan on taking the 50D and the 28mm USM to Canon Datascript Service Center. My 50D needs its focus screen adjusted, it tilts slightly counter-clockwise so I can't use the 9-AF point to align the horizon, but other then that, everything actually works just fine. and my 28mm needs its focus accuracy calibrated. Three days ago at Focusnusantara as I buy the rookie 50mm, I also tested my 28mm focus accuracy, it turn out to be slightly backward 1 cm, and 1 cm is huge if you take a close shot of an object with large aperture. Tiny DOF wouldn't tolerate any miss-focus.

Back to my lenses photos, I know as a rule that to take a nice product shot, you have to use a long focal length, it gives a better perspective, never ever ever use a wide focal (less then 50mm that is) because your product will look distorted (and this focal-distortion is the reason why I bought a 50mm, I'll discuss this at my 50mm f/1.8 review) same goes for a serious portrait work. That's why I choose my cheapo tele to do the job. So I set my cheapo tele to 200mm, wide open at f.5/6. And I also prepared the scene, I placed my lenses on a chair, covered with white A4 paper to give the white background. I placed the chair at the terrace facing the garden so the 11-12 am light didn't shine directly to the scene and then I started to shoot.

Satisfy with the result, I transfer all the result to my old lousy ACER, and edited it in photoshop. I first fixed exposures and colours, and later I cropped, resized, smart-sharpened and name-tagged each of them. and to my surprise, the result is beyond my expectation. Here, see for yourself:

Canon EF 28mm f/1.8 USM

Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II

Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II, extended barrel

I have no studio, I use no build-in flash, no external speedlite. Heck, I got no lighting equipment at all, they are expensive and I'll rarely use them since I hate flash light. But apparently using only the modest resources like the white A4 paper, the Sun, and with the help of Photoshop CS4, I'm very pleased with the result. The smart-sharpen tools from CS4 with radius 0.2 and amount set to 150% really pumped out the image quality.

I shoot everything handheld. If I bothered to use tripod, used smaller aperture for better sharpness, and cleaned all the dust and speckle either at the lens or by photoshop, the result would've been much better. But who cares, I'm not a professional reviewer, I just wanna share a little experience I got with these tools of mine, so I thought I better use my own image.