Smart Trike

As I mentioned on the big day, my nephew (and god-son) Samuel celebrated his first birthday last Thursday.  I didn’t make the celebrations, but he is coming to visit us this weekend along with his mom and his sister Abbie (who herself is a regular on the blog), so not only will we have birthday cake, but we’ll get to give him his present.  And I have to say, it’s a pretty cool present.  It’s called a Smart Trike, and is designed to adapt as he grows, and it’s suitable for children from 10 months up.  I had some fun assembling it last night, which gave me the chance to take a few photographs of it also.

I haven’t done much product photography, so this was a chance to experiment a little bit with that.  I had this blog post in mind as the final destination for the photos, so rather than post a single picture of the trike, I decided to take a number of detail shots and put them together as a panel.  The images I post here mostly have a 3:2 aspect ratio, as the window for them is 900 x 600 pixels, and I had decided on a panel of 6 images to show different aspects of “the product”, so that meant each image would have to be a square crop.

A benefit of thinking this through in advance was that it allowed me to shoot for the square crop, which is generally a little-used aspect ratio in most photography.  I think it relates to how things look better off-centre than they do centred in a composition (in general) and getting that right with a square image is a little harder to do.

At a practical level, shooting for a square format is tricky too because the viewfinder, which matches the sensor, is 3:2.  I had to previsualize a square crop of the viewfinder as I composed, but I suppose the flip side was that, if I got it wrong, I had extra image to work with for an alternative crop in post production.  For five of these six images though, the final crop is from the absolute centre of the frame, so I did pretty good on this front.

In an ideal world I’d have shot these photos on a clean background – my seamless white for instance – but time didn’t allow for that.  I toyed with the idea of taking the trike out to the back garden for a “motivated” background – i.e. one that would make sense in relation to the subject – but instead used the kitchen to do the photos.  The tiled floor would be relatively unobtrusive, and I had settled on a shallow depth of field to isolate specific parts of the bike, so that would itself help clean up the background by throwing it out of focus.

For lighting, I used two light sources.  One is the ambient light, which I was able to include at f/2.8 by bumping the ISO from 200 to 400 and putting the shutter at 1/60s.  The other was a 24″ softbox, with my SB-600 firing through it.  I kept this close to the subject, and it’s position varies. For 5 of the 6 shots I had it at floor level, directly facing the trike, and at camera right.  For the shot looking down on the handle, I have it held out in front of me, directly above the trike and facing down. Where the softbox is on the floor, it’s generally throwing light from the opposite direction to the ambient light, which is coming from the kitchen window.  For instance, in the image at bottom left the highlight on the yellow part of the trike is from the softbox at camera right, while the highlight on the orange mudguard is from the kitchen window.

For some of the shots a more refined lighting scheme might have worked better, but I was acting fast, and got these 6 shots (and three alternates that didn’t make the cut) in about 7 minutes.  Another 5 or 6 minutes for them to transfer to the laptop, batch process and crop them and I was done.

Concept to post-processed images in about 15 minutes.  And I like the images that resulted.  Let’s just hope Samuel likes his present when he gets it on Friday evening!