A random Weblog

The idea was to photograph a series of pet-food packs. This seemed easy enough, but it wasn’t as simple as it might seem…

The plastic packs proved highly reflective (as seen on the left image), so a few tricks were required.  Firstly I used a polarizing filter over the lens, then I experimented with polarizing gel over the flashes.  This helped a lot, but the final tweak came via a simple trick – namely to take one photo, move the lights and take another.  The two images were then overlaid in Photoshop, and using selective masking I could paint over most of the reflections showing a non-highlighted part of the pack in the layer below (I left some reflections on purpose to communicate the surface feel)

So far so good…