Back in October 2012, I was connected with a California sales engineer and manufacturer in need of a product photographer with experience in photographing and editing particularly metallic and reflective materials. Confident as I was on my eighteenth month of photographing intricate, high-end jewelry built on precious metals of different lustrous colors and well garnished with gleaming gems, I boastfully accepted the job. The shipments came in, my screwdrivers came out, and before I knew it, the first floor of my Coral Gables loft was the set of a multiple iPad enclosure products including sleek podiums, table top stands, and flush wall units, all assembled and striking posses for my camera. Bearing iPads, each product's final image would have a screen shot of the manufacturer's webpage. Now, although completely doable, the best practice for translating a lit and active screen in a product image such as an iPad, or a television, or anything with a screen is to superimpose a screenshot of the ideal screen into the screen of the product in post-production, and not necessarily having the screen live during the photo shoot. Even some of the high end jewelry underwent a similar fate as the head-on angle of , for example, a ring produced the center stone's best angle to show off it's intricate geometry and the depths of into beauty, and the reason for that is mainly the gem stone's symmetry at a head-on angle. But as for the iPad products I was photographing currently, this superposition of a live and active screen opened a rather encouraging can of worms.
You see, my California client was bouncing back and forth from the images I was delivering, and images of iPads on the web, and coming back to me with remarks on how my images just didn't look as enticing and glossy as the images of iPads everywhere else. The images looked fine to me. They were high enough resolution to be zoomed into, I left no hot spots or dark spots in any of the images, and they all appeared uniform to one another. I knew that if I was happy, and he was not, that there was something I wasn't seeing. The eye of the graphic designer versus the viewer often differs greatly. An amateur graphic designer is preoccupied with details and the relationship with colors and shades and composition, and see's his art through the program in which he designed it. A viewer has a healthy distance from all of this, and can only explain what they see, or how they feel about it. And at this very moment in my professional life, this gap between I the designer and he the viewer never presented itself so clearly as it ever did before. It was time to peel off the designer cap that had metaphorically melted onto my scalp and put on the psychologist cap. I often asked myself what he saw, what was he even talking about, what made him feel that way, and eventually it came to me. My client was explaining to me that it was not the surface of his products on my images that were lacking a certain texture, but the reflections that were bouncing off the iPads he saw online, the abundance of streaks and gradients of light and the range of shades that those other product photos had that my images so heavily lacked.
Before long, our consensual benchmark of quality, or the quality that my iPad products photos where going to be measured off of was the quality that Apple.com itself held it's product photographs to. In other words, whatever was coming out of my loft was to match in quality what you see blown up 150 feet across a skyscraper, or a magazine, or a TV commercial. And that was just it! I had an end goal. Despite it feeling like a far cry from what I thought I could produce, I knew what I had to do. I made the Apple website my life for about two or three days. I color sampled each the black and white iPads from their site at least 20 times from the lightest shade of black or white to the darkest. I emulated the iPad's streak of light coming down from the top of the product, crossing to the right and fading out well into the product's screen. I even practiced the angled of the iPads to the angles of the products I was shooting.
In the end, my client was happy, I was happy, and the images I delivered surpassed any of our expectations on this project. More recently, I was contracted by the same client to bring these products to life via GIF animation among other edits to the images.
Visit the iStyleStand website to view the final product of the technological growth process just described.
- Anthony Nader
In the end, my client was happy, I was happy, and the images I delivered surpassed any of our expectations on this project. More recently, I was contracted by the same client to bring these products to life via GIF animation among other edits to the images.
Visit the iStyleStand website to view the final product of the technological growth process just described.
- Anthony Nader
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