How to photograph a rice cooker? Well, I started off like most product shots. Light box and two strobes throwing light everywhereeeeeeee. When I look at the product picture on the box, it seems like there were two giant soft boxes that cross lit it. What I mean by this is one light on either side of the cooker, about 45 degrees off center or 90 degrees to each other. This gave nice specular highlights that we'd expect in metal, but with out all the distracting crinkles that a small light would make. The bigger the light, the bigger the reflection of that light, and the cleaner it looks.
For my set up, I had the cooker on a little platform in the middle, build with a pice of cardboard under the white fabric. This put the cooker up a bit, and made some wonderful little creases in the fabric. It also allowed me to shoot the cooker from directly on.
The two lighter were in the set up previously described, at a mid power of 1/16 and shooting at f5.6. This gave the cooker a good all around illumination, while really exposing the background into white.
However, in editing, I changed this a bit. While just playing around, I made a vignette around the cooker that darkened the background. I initially wanted to darken the middle of the cooker a bit, but I really, really liked how the background became this soft glow around the cooker. Just lovely. I made the vignette decrease sharpness a ton, as well as exposure, shadows, and clarity a bit. Then I raised contrast and highlights a lot. This accomplished the soft glow I was talking about. It's hard to describe, so you can just look and hopefully you'll get what I'm saying. Here's a before and after the vignette effect.
See you tomorrow!
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