Hey guys to start off my blog post let me introduce myself a little. My name is Bobby Altman and I am the staff photographer here at Smokingpipes.com. I have a background in editorial and commercial photography specializing in sports, product, and food. My blog posts are going to be about recent photo projects we have worked on and the execution of the photos.

For this first post we wanted to have a slideshow playing at our tent after the Chicago pipe show this year so I figured just shooting on white would be the best way to go, however I wanted the background to be seamless, simple yet still interesting and showing the shapes of the pipes we selected. To illustrate how simple it is to do this I have also provided a shot of the set up.

I set up some white photo paper long ways on a table and placed a piece of glass on top of that to give a light reflection. for the pipes glass works great but for people I used white tile board from Lowes. (Tile board is about $12 and comes in a 4X8 sheet...and wont break if you stand on it.) The table was positioned about 3 feet from a white wall. The key to doing this is to get the object you are shoot as far from the white background as possible because the light will bounce back onto your subject. The main light is bouncing out of an umbrella to camera right and the background light is pointed at the wall directly behind the pipe. I used some white foam core board to stop any spill from the background light onto the pipe and to bounce a little of the main light back to fill in the shadows a little on the left of the pipe. The background lights in a shot like this generally need to be about one full stop brighter than the main light to blow it out.