How Pack Photography Can Fool The Eye   by Justin Arnold

When it comes to tricks of the trade it seems that there are few businesses with quite as many secrets as those photography studios providing pack photography services and catalogue photo services. A quick glance around at the number of catalogues, sales catalogues, brochures, posters and leaflets all around us shows us just how busy pack photography providers really are.

With such a broad range of products on offer, it is inevitable that they have over the years built up their own catalogue of tricks of the trade and techniques which enable their catalogue photo results to look significantly different from anything which we might be able to achieve, even given a high quality digital camera and some fairly sophisticated software.

When you consider that pack photography might be anything from a small diamond ring to a paddling pool, and from a fountain pen to a motorbike, the range of tricks and techniques is simply enormous, and plenty of books and articles have been written on the subject, providing a wealth of material to choose from should you be interested in finding out a little more about how the professionals achieve the outstanding pack photography look which they regularly do.

At first glance it often doesn’t seem that professional photographers have done very much more that we might, given the same product and set. But the point is that it is often not the most obvious features of the photograph which cause the problem, but the more subtle aspects of images which have benefited from the expert understanding of the way in which the human eye and brain works.

Let’s take a complicated example such as a motorbike. Let’s say you put that motorbike in a studio or well lit area, and have a completely blank or neutral background. All of these issues are themselves more complex than they might appear, but for the purpose of this article we’ll accept that they are all possible by any one.

If you now sit in front of the motorbike and look at it you will be able to move your eye over every aspect of the motorbike, and see every aspect and detail of the motorbike in perfect clarity. If you now take out a reasonable quality digital camera and you take a catalogue photo of the bike exactly as you see it, and from exactly the same position, with no alteration to the lighting, what will you end up with?

Most people would assume that what they will end up with is a photograph which looks virtually indistinguishable from the image of the motorbike which they saw when sitting in the chair just a few seconds before taking the photograph. However, it is almost certainly not going to be the case. So why is there a difference between what you see normally, and what a camera sees?

The answer is the way in which the human eye actually works. As you look from the darker parts of the bicycle to the lighter parts of the bicycle your eye automatically adjusts to adapt the amount of light coming in. This enables you to see the same level of detail in the darker parts, such as the wheels or parts of the engine, as well as seeing the same level of detail in the light areas, such as the chrome details.

A camera has no such flexibility, simply taking an overall average. So when a professional photographer approaches pack photography, what they do is to take a catalogue photo which produces the same end result which the human eye can see, but which is normally quite impossible to achieve with any camera. So how they do it? It’s a trade secret, of course!

About the Author

For more information on pack photography or to find out more about how professional photography studio can create a high quality, very effective catalogue photo, visit The Packshot People.
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