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Category: Still-Life Tools
Heavy Washers
On the topic of propping items up in a still-life set, besides blocks, rubber, and wax, keep a small pile of heavy round washers handy. Because the washers are flat, they are stackable. The hole in the center is useful to help balance things on the washers. Washers slide easily into place and can be [...]
Dental Wax
There are two types of wax that are terrific tools for the still-life photographer, but dental wax has the catchier title, and I’ll start with that. So continuing our shopping excursion, now that we’ve been through the Army & Navy store, hardware store, and office supply stores, we’re on to the drugstore and the art [...]
Rubber Kneadable Eraser
Besides the Army & Navy stores, and the hardware stores, office supply superstores are offer a bonanza of irreverent photo tools. Next time you are shopping for note pads or toner cartridges for your office, stop into the aisle that features pencil and erasers and pick up a rubber kneadable eraser to keep as a [...]
Wood Blocks
It may be since your childhood that you played with wooden blocks, but you should definitely keep a lot of them, all different sizes, shapes, and weights, for propping up items in your still-life photo sets. (See Figure 6.18.) Toy blocks work great for propping up very small items, but anything with weight to it [...]
Spray Can Columns for Glass
Shooting an object on a sheet of glass can serve two purposes: to have a reflection of the still-life subject as a graphic technique or to shoot something without a shadow. In order to do the latter, especially, glass has to be raised up from a tabletop. I’ve found no better support for a glass [...]
Flashlight
Another great lighting technique for still-life photography is to use a flashlight to paint with light. Painting with light came into vogue in the 1980s, but technology for flashlights, and especially bright LED flashlights, has evolved since then. And while a flash can be used to paint with light in large scenes, for small still-life [...]
Mirror
If one light is good, two must be better! Well, that’s not necessarily true, but there are times when you want to have two lights illuminating your subject and you just don’t have the extra light, or you don’t have a light small enough to position at just the right spot in a still-life set. [...]
Window Screen
On the topic of lighting, light modifiers are a key to getting just the right light for your still-life subject. If you search for lighting modifiers in a nearby camera store, or virtual photo store, you’ll find loads of professional tools—translucent silks, soft boxes, umbrellas, reflectors, and so forth—to add to your lighting arsenal. However, [...]
Fake Window
If you took my advice and went to a museum or bookstore to view still-life paintings, you may have come across the work of the great Dutch masters. The light they represent in their paintings has an almost unimaginably diffuse quality. You might be able to reproduce that light with a natural-light window, but here’s [...]
A Window
I was speaking with a magazine photographer, someone who shoots still-life images for national publications and is excellent at what he does. We got onto the topic of food photography and how difficult it is, especially photographing under studio lights. Studio lights tend to wilt food, melt anything meltable, and generally hamper a food photographer [...]
