doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Shotgun photography and background color

Posted for David, he can explain.

Mike, it seems even the pros don't get the gun lit up as well as it could be using a white background. Of all of them , I prefer the grey. The Holt Auction catalog uses a fairly dark blue and their photos are great. I enjoy the guns, but really have seen enough tweed and other stuff.

WOW! I have been away from the computer and backed up. I’ll try to answer all questions. I have tried cloth and do have parachute cloth but did not use it on this one. I’m using reflected light off dull white. Yes all the pictures were the same with only the color changes, the last one (13) was a longer exposure by myself. I have never taken a picture with the camera in auto ;-).

SDH, with your help I’ve got this far, glad you like it.

Daryl, Thanks I’ll pull a Holt’s catalog and have a look.


The thing I don’t want to do is distract from the gunmakers artistic work. It’s been difficult to capture firearms the way I see them. The warmth and glow of a hundred years of patina is hard enough to convey in words, pictures are just as hard to master.

My impression is that the background should be of a color(s) that has (have) as little opportunity of being confused with a/o sharing with colors of the subject. Thus colors in the firearm such as blues (action case color), reds (case color and wood), greys (action), and browns (wood) should not be used as background in photos of a firearm. I think that some of the photos with a dark green background work quite well. That being said lighting is prolly most important in that it shouldn't be so direct as to create reflection but light and diffused enough to show the details. Also the background color(s) should not detract attention from the subject (yellow should be dismissed but straw or mustard might work well).

To my eyes white washes out the highlights of metal work.

To convey the guns true appearance from a technical standpoint gray would be best. I imagine this is what you're looking for.

To sell a gun a dark background makes the gun "pop" and the contrast looks good.

I have to say though I like the 3D effect that David Drew's mottled background provides.

BTW you can buy a used edition of Photoshop on Ebay relatively cheap. Professional photographers and the like have to keep up with the latest edition and frequently sell the older editions. I have a 5 year old copy for Mac that suits me fine, it has more stuff than I'll ever use.

One of the things I found is that lighting will drastically change the way casecolors appear. The pics below illustrate. Actually, the direct flash lighting shows them closer to reality than the bounced flash diffused lighting.





With other features of a gun, different lighting such that shadows are cast to detect texture, may be needed. Experimentation may reveal the best solution for a particular subject detail.



Figure of wood is particularly sensitive to lighting changes on how it appears in pics in my experience.

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Michael, Thank you very much for posting the photo for me. I shot the photo in a hurry more to show the background and didn't have time to set up the reflectors I would normally use. It was shot with two Nikon strobes mounted on a Really Right Stuff Flash Bracket. One strobe faced forward and had a Lumiquest soft box, the other faced 180 degrees and fired into a circular reflector held by a boom stand.

The effect is to illuminate the foreground subject and have sufficient distance between the subject and the background that the background will be out of focus. The soft background provides some texture and some variation without drawing your attention away from the subject. These painted backgrounds are available from any of the photography suppliers, but I made this one.

Best regards,
David

Nice work, here's one small suggestion. When non-flat lighting is used, the stronger light generally should come from above, not below. We're used to seeing things lit by the sun and sky, highlights above and shadows toward the bottom.

I threw this setup together in a hurry because I was working on another job and just wanted to show the background to everyone. The master stobe was above with a softbox and the fill strobe was set to fire at about half power and was aimed backwards and upside down firing at a round light disc type reflector. I couldn't spend a lot of time on it. Normally I would build a silk tent and use hot lights on individual stands and use distance to regulate the fill light.

Just a point I recall from my photo classes in college, some fluorescent lighting tends to be magenta (pinkish) which has a "cold" cast. Of course, with digital cameras and computer editting, color cast can now be changed drastically at will.