Projects & Blogs

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Project Lead : Catrin Davies

Product Hero Shots & Catalog Shots for the Temple Drum.

Temple Drum are a new company from the Ruthin area who make a type of metal tone drum from recycled gas cylinders and spun metal domes.

Temple Drum approached Stiwdio Franwen for help with branding, putting together an website and product images.

Catrin was keen to begin work on the photography for Temple Drum and as soon as Damian from Temple Drum had dropped off a sample with us, she began work on trying to capture images that would do the drum justice.

However, that was not as easy as it might first sound. The sample drum was finished in a highly reflective paint and lacquer which made it extremely difficult to photograph.

Catrin tried numerous locations and techniques to try and find a way to capture the drum without reflections or lighting or herself being to obvious.

One of initial attempts was using a white cloth and softball lights. This technique provided a good visual appearance of the drum, but suffered from issues with reflections of the light sources and surrounding room.

After having a session with professional photographer, Justin Van Marle, Catrin was able to put in place some suggestions. These included using a long zoom lens to allow the photographer to be further from the subject and therefore smaller in the reflection and shooting the drum out in nature so the reflections are more attractive.

Catrin took all this onboard and promptly set off with Deian to try and shoot some more natural images of the drum along the Menai Straights. The results were a great improvement.

Catrin also tried shooting the Drum in a light tent which was a lot more effective than the white sheet and softball lights.

The images from the light tent still required some image editing to remove some of the reflections and to clean up the background.

Catrin used Adobe Camera Raw, Photoshop, Lightroom and Affinity Photo to take the RAW files she’d shot on her camera, rank/score them and then manipulate the image until she was happy with the exposure levels and appearance of the image.  She then used the tools in Photoshop & Affinity Photo such as stamp, healing brushes, feathered selections, blurs and paint brushes, to clean up the backgrounds, remove unwanted reflections and style the image.

Catrin then sent images to Yannick in the Stiwdio to use on the Temple Drum Website.

Skills Learned

• Camera Work
• Choosing Lenses
• Exposure & Focusing Techniques
• Lighting
• Image Editing – Exposure, Balancing, etc.
• Image Manipulation – ‘Photoshopping’ – Removing unwanted elements, improving appearance.

Software Used

• Adobe Lightroom
• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Camera Raw
• Affinity Photo

Hardware Used

• Nikon D750
• Nikon D5100
• Nikon Lenses
• Tripod
• Light Tent & Lighting
• Softbox Lights