How To Make EPIC Product PHOTOGRAPHY and VIDEO - Behind The Scenes ft. Geologie

So, Geology, the maker of these awesome creams and face washes for men, reached out wanting to do a project with me. So, I thought why not show you how I would both photograph it and do the video for their product. Now, you guys know I'm a food photographer but product photography, actually being a close sibling to food photography, always gets me excited when I get a chance to dive into that still life genre. So, here's a good look at the product that we have for the video and images. Nothing too crazy going on here. They're two-toned reflective surfaces with the primary color of this nice gray with a really good yellow and blue as accent colors for the text. The text is very simple, minimalistic and graphic. However, there is something really interesting going on up top here. This G is so iconic of the brand and it's definitely a bold and recognizable part of these bottles. So, I know I definitely want to capture that really great logo on the cap. Now, I've seen a couple of shots in other advertisements where the light is moving across the product and I thought this was a really great idea. So, I got my light here on the stand and I'm just gonna rotate the light across the cap. And I like this idea a lot because it's kind of like saying, hey everyone, this is video and what would be an otherwise still life shot. So, for this other cap, I want it to look a little bit different. So, I'm gonna zoom way in here, get a nice shallow depth of field on that logo and then using my edelkrone slider, pull back as the light moves across the cap. Just to give me a different look and it kind of reminds me of that universal logo of the earth that you see at the beginning of every movie. It took me a few attempts to get the speed of rotating light just right and time it with a slider movement. But I think it came out pretty nice. Moving on to the next shot here, I have all of my bottles placed on the turntable. It's going to be a really cool like spinning shot. But one thing I thought about while I was setting up is the importance of the lighting on the bottles and I think the most important thing for this shoot is to have the lighting consistent on almost every level. For example, where the edge of the reflection ends on the bottle right here. I played around with a few different setups and one of them, I saw that the end of this reflection here is sort of underlining the geology text on the bottle. I thought that was a pretty cool way of making the text stand out on the bottle. So, for example, as these bottles rotate around the table, I want to make sure that each is in focus as it rotates but also that each reflection of light underlines the geology logo as best it can as it rotates as well. Also with my X-T3, I'm shooting this clip at 120 frames per second so I can have the ability to add a few speed ramps in post to speed up and slow down some of this footage. There are some great tutorials online all about speed ramping. Basically, you have a clip on the timeline, right click on it, select show clip keyframes, time remapping speed that opens up your clip and then you can move to the spot that you want to speed up or slow down and add a Let's say I want to speed up my clip until right here before it reaches this logo. Now I'll set my playhead right there and click on the keyframe button over here. This will allow me to speed up the action, slow it down smoothly, and then ramp it back up again. So I can drag this line to speed up this first portion to say around 9,000 I think because it's a really slow-mo clip. And now I have it coming in really quick and then slow down right on the logo. That's pretty cool. But to get the ramp so that the transition isn't so sharp, I can click on one of these tabs, draw it out, and click here to drag out the curve. Now it's a speed ramp. I can do the same to the tail end of this clip and it will start sped up, go into slow motion, and then smoothly transition back out again. I can even copy this clip, remove all the keyframes, reverse the clip by going into speed duration, and then speed this whole clip up to say 18,000 percent or something like that. And now it gives me this really cool boomerang effect. This gives you a really nice smooth transition between that fast and slow-mo action. Also while I'm here editing, I have this last clip of both of the bottles together. Now they're side by side, but before one was causing some horrible reflections in the other, so I filmed it twice with the slider. One with one bottle and one with the other. Now I have two shots and each bottle has nice reflections. And just like I did to combine the stop motion with the live action in my last video, you can put both of these clips together using opacity masks. However, because I'm using the slider and there is motion in the clip, I have to keyframe the mask so it follows the bottle. If I leave it as is, this other bottle gets cut off as the slider moves. So as the camera moves, I'll set my first keyframe by clicking over here on the watch symbol in my editing panel, let it play a little, and then update the position of the mask. And I'll keep doing that until the end of the clip. So now I have a mask that follows the slider's movement and both bottles sit next to each other in this final shot with nice reflections. Every product shoot, whether it's stills or videos, comes with a million problems. It could be the product, or the packaging, or the camera movement, or even the set itself. And it's fun to win those battles and find creative solutions. I have a larger fish tank that I use to capture water drops and splash photography, but it's currently buried under a ton of stuff right now, and I just wanted to grab this quick clip of a water drop that would be an abstract shot to tie in this geology face wash. So, Martini, anyone? This shot took forever. I don't have one of those cool but highly specific tools for landing the perfect drips on camera. So to get the drip to land perfectly on my narrow beam of focus, hovering the eyedropper above it is just not working. So I'm attaching a super clamp to the end of this extension arm and resting my eyedropper on it. It worked out really well actually, and after a few tries I got one drip I was happy with. And I was happy with how the whole video turned out. A short little commercial, but really fun to get out that macro lens, play around with the lighting, and create some cool camera movements. All right, so that was the video portion of the product shoot, so it's time to jump into the photography. Now, I know I want it to be similar to the video, but maybe possibly incorporating more of that still life genre, but while at the same time, you know, keeping in line with the feeling and mood of the video. I haven't really shown still life on this channel before, so I'm kind of excited to dive into it. I have the elements here that I'm going to use to make these images. A white piece of foam core that I'll use as my tabletop. Then some different colored squares of art paper, and of course our products here. And this is the white version of that black acrylic tabletop that you saw me use in my videos. I like the circular shape, and I thought I might be able to throw it in somewhere. I'm going to start by building my scene. Then after that is built, perfect the lighting on the products. I have this idea in my head that I want to try out, so I think I'll frame it up to give me multiple levels with the table and the product up here, and the camera almost level with it. And then a little depth in this corner down here to the left. On a little side note here, I'm going to be photographing this image using my constant lights, my SLB-60s, mainly just so you can see on camera what it looks like as I build this image. I would most likely photograph this with my studio strobes, but it shouldn't really be an issue as long as I manage all of the other lighting in my studio while I'm taking this image. Now for the backgrounds. Because the color of the product, well at least the text is a nice blue, I think I'm going to use two shades of blue. This lighter blue is actually one that I use for the background in the video. Now I need to tape them to something that will stand up, so out comes the trusty cutting board. I'll just bring it to the bottom edge, make sure that it's perfectly straight here, and tape it to the board. I'll let it hang over a bit and then tape this lighter blue paper down here, which will add that second layer below the table. I'll just set the product as a stand-in here to see how we're coming along, and you know what, I like it. We have some strong leading lines to our products and our environment has some nice shape and depth to it, but we definitely need to add some more to take away some of this negative space here and here. I'll just roll in my turntable here. This will give me a nice round line amongst all these other straight lines, and it'll also give me a nice layered effect with the white and blue. I'm liking it so far, but I'm not sure if it's done yet. There is a lot of white here still, a lot of negative space, so I think I'm going to try and just fill that in with another block of color. That's pretty cool. This product is sitting in this little white triangle framed by the blue color, and it's giving me this blue-white-blue layering. All right, I think that's a pretty stellar environment for our product to sit in, so now it's time to light this bottle up. Personally, I want to match the look and feel of the video that I created, so I'm going to try to replicate that with the lighting. I'm going to start here on the left-hand side with my large oval diffuser right up against the edge of the background here. I'm going to angle the softbox where it's not straight on with the product, but coming more at a 45 degree angle towards my camera. This allows for more of a feathered highlight. I'm also going to rotate the bottle so that the end of the reflection underlines the geology text. Just grab another quick image here, and then move on to the next light. The second light is going to be very similar to the first one, but instead of the large oval diffuser, I'm going to be placing it behind this giant roll of diffusement paper, which I have to say is a pretty good price for the amount that you get. I mean, you get a ton of it, so if I can still find it, I'll place a link in the description below. On this side, I'll move my light so that the reflection of the light ends before the edge of the bottle, which I feel adds a bit more shape to it. And that's it for this product image. I'm really happy with the geometry of it all. The layers and the depth made by the colors just, for some reason, makes my brain happy. Anyways, a huge thanks to Geologie. Really, thank you guys so much for sponsoring this video and for sending over all this great product to photograph. If you guys haven't heard about Geologie yet, go check them out. They make a ton of great face washes and stuff for men, and they send it straight to your door, so you don't have to go shopping for it. You don't have to hunt around the aisles looking for the stuff that you need. They make it easy for you. They've won a bunch of awards. I signed up a while back, and you know, they ask a couple questions, and then they send out this personalized custom kit straight to your door. Again, you don't have to go shopping for it, which I think is the best thing in the world. So, for all my dudes out there, check out that link in the description below. Show Geologie some love. Thanks again, Geologie, for sponsoring this video. And hey, as always, if you like this content, hit that subscribe button, turn on notifications, give it some thumbs up, drop some comments down below, and I'll see you in the next one.