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Friday, September 21, 2007

furniture after retouching


furniture after
Originally uploaded by brendan.oshea
I took a job doing an office furniture catalog, and it was a lot tougher than I thought. It took at least an hour to get the lighting right for this shot, taking care not to get any hotspots and making sure there were no distracting shadows. I ended up hanging a large white scrim (What's the old sheet for? Watcha doin'.. hangin' out your laundry? etc...etc...) to the camera left and firing a couple of sunpak 383's through it at full power.
Light falloff was a problem inasmuch as the desk was blown out, but the shelves were underexposed. I had to have the scrim some distance away to reduce this falloff effect. Shadows were reduced further by a Canon 430EX fired into an umbrella camera right. You can see the stand in the "before" photo.

I took all the shots for the catalog using a Canon 24-105mm. Normally my favourite lens, but as it turns out, not so good when it comes to barrel distortion. Something I only noticed when I was trying to create a room for the furniture in Photoshop. No amount of work in lens correction could fix it entirely. I could never get the walls looking right. I'm saving up for a 45mm tilt shift lens, but in the meantime my 10-22mm has much better distortion characteristics.
The frame on the wall was made in Photoshop, and the picture is one of my shots from a visit to Bryce Canyon last year.
To see the "before" shot, click on the photo and follow it through to my flickr page.