As an assignment at New England Tech (NEIT), I was to take product shots and use them to make a catalog. So first thing’s first: what do I shoot? It took a lot of contemplation, but considering my obsession with music, I first thought of shooting vinyl records. The only problem was that records are all pretty much the same thing, just with different artwork or colored vinyl. This could limit you, and prevent you from getting different kinds of photos.
I eventually came to the conclusion that I could bring in my pedal board and case, loaded up with a bunch of accessories (strings, picks, etc.) and that could be included. Once those were taken, I brought them into photoshop to get the levels right and fix any blemishes. Those came out looking like this:
From there, I had to mask them in Photoshop, so that I had just the product, without any of the background. It would leave me with an image of the product alone with a transparent background. This would make the shots less distracting, especially in the context of a catalog. The catalog would actually be the next step.
Considering the cool colors of all the pedals, I decided a gradient for the background would go along well with the gear, but the gradient wasn’t enough. I grabbed a texture and put it on-top of the gradient but turned the opacity way down to make it much more subtle. After that, it was a matter of spacing everything, writing a description that did the product justice but wasn’t too verbose, and maintaining hierarchy.
After bringing this to others and getting their input, it was brought to my attention that there still wasn’t enough hierarchy in the titles of the products and that the cover page looked kind of awkward. I went to fix and it and came out with this result: