How I Capture Stock Photos on a Budget
Recently I was after some images or more precisely Stock Images of my Fuji X-T1 which I needed for my blog, so I thought hey what the heck I will just shoot some images myself. I pulled out my Westcott Apollo softbox, a Light stand and a few things from around the house to setup a little studio.
After I got the lighting setup and my Canon 7D ready to shoot I started shooting some behind the scene images so that I could share with you how I achieved the final images. The setup was pretty simple, I chose a corner in the house which had two walls available for reflecting light and my softbox as the key source of light. My table was an upside down clothes basket with a white cardboard as the underlay. I also use my Macbook Pro box as a reflector, thanks to Apple for such a pure white box. I have used the Macbook Pro box for even doing Macro photography at time as it becomes a great light source, reflector or background.
The first thing you want to do before starting to shoot stock images, is get your subject nice and clean. So I use a rocket blower, brush and lens cloth to clean my camera and lens which I planned to shoot as my subjects.
Next up my shooting angles and perspectives were side on, front on and overhead. The behind the scene images below show these perspectives.
Side On
Front On
Overhead
I used Canon 24-105mm F4 and 100mm F2.8 Macro lens to shoot all the images. In the softbox I was using Canon 430EX II flash in Slave mode fired and control using the 7D’s pop-up flash.
The final item was to show you that with a bit of practice and out of the box thinking you can get great images from using Lightroom only to process the images. All the tools available in Lightroom let us post-process these images and get some clean results.
All the images below were edited purely in Lightroom, I got the white background pure white by setting a White Point and where this was not enough I used an Adjustment Brush to get it close to white. Then adjusting Highlights, Shadows, Contrast and setting the Black Point.
Lightroom Edit – Set White Point & additional adjustments
Some of the close up shots especially with Macro lens captured some of the dust, lint and other particles which are easy to get rid of using the Spot Removal tool.
Spot Removal tool
Here are some of the final results. To see the full edits and my detailed walkthrough you can watch the video below.
