Attempts at Product Photography with a Fukubukuro

The Fukubukuro with the thank you card from Japan House London. This shot was taken with the full lighting set-up, you can compare it to the other two below. 1s 105mm F11 ISO 64.

As a freelancer I am always thinking about news ways to improve my photography so I can find different types of jobs and earn more money. It’s also true that trying out different disciplines of photography will help you with what you already shoot. Afterall, photography is all about understanding light. I’ve never done any kind of real studio photography, but for a little while now I’ve wanted to have a go at improving my flash photography. Just how do they create all those product images we see online? Handily for Christmas I got a copy of Nath Sakura’s excellent book Product Photography: Lighting, Composition, and Shooting Techniques and as soon as I opened it I knew it was going to be gold. One of the great things about Covid is that so many experts had time to finally write that book they always wanted to write, and now we can reap the benefits.

The first shot was taken with just natural light. It’s far too contrasty and the white wall has turned grey. 1s 105mm F11 ISO 64.

The second one was taken with just the strobe and shoot through umbrella. Everything is much brighter and in a way the shadow strip along the bottom makes the bag standout more, but it's better with the backlight included. 1s 105mm F11 ISO 64.

Even if you don’t intend to do a lot of product photography it is well worth picking up a copy as it goes into great detail in the impact of light with clear illustrations. I was certainly very keen to have a go and get started and with a good bit of timing the perfect subject(s) fell into my lap. Fukubukuro, or as we would say in English, lucky bags. While Christmas is the most major winter holiday in in the Western world, New Year is the most important in Japan. At this time companies across the country offer Fukubukuro to keen customers, which are essentially large lucky dip bags for adults. A random assortment of items of a particular theme are placed in a sealed bag and sold for less than the sum total of their contents. Part of the excitement is simply the anticipation of seeing what you will get.

The entire contents of the fukubukuro. I decided the best way to use the furoshiki was as the base of the image. It hides the box the daruma came in which I cold use to prop up the postcards and bookmark. However as the colours are different on each side, they bleed through in some places. The mizuhiki pin badge could then be placed at the front with folds in the fabric to aid in separation. However I should have ensured it sat flat at the front to avoid those shadows. The settings seem very off in this shot as I was setting up a Fuji Instax Wide shot and this one had better composition than the shot at ISO 64. 1/400s 105mm F22 ISO 800.

While not a tradition in the UK, Japan House London sells a limited number in early January of each year. On offer were three options - small, medium and large and I opted to pick up a small one. In mine was a small Daruma doll, a kanji bookmark, a furoshiki, two post cards from the previous WAVE exhibition and a mizuhiki pin badge (and of course the cloth sack itself and a thank you card from Japan House London). Time to assemble everything and have a go in my own pop-up studio.

The daruma was straightforward to shoot but by brightening the area around the base to hide the texture of the polystyrene, it now looks like it is floating in a sea of white. 1s 105mm F11 ISO 64.

For a little while now I have been collecting large pieces of white polystyrene for this very purpose, a convenient no cost solution. I placed myself near a window just to see the difference between natural light and flash, but my finished set up was with two strobes. One in a softbox directly behind the subjects to create a bright white background, the other off to 45° angled from above with a shoot through umbrella as my key light. The previous day I’d put together a list of different images I want to shoot, putting some thought into how I wanted everything to be arranged, which is almost as important as the lighting itself. With each object being very different in size and shape this proved to be a challenge.

I only realised the damage on the mizuhiki pin badge (upper right) when I was editing the photo. Although it was hard to see at the time as the item is so small. Goes to show how even small imperfections can become very obvious when blown up to more than life size. 1s 105mm F11 ISO 64.

I needed a ‘group’ shot of all the contents and then individual shots of each item. I was initially unsure how to photograph the furoshiki, as it is essentially a very large handkerchief, but I ultimately decided to utilise it in three different ways. Firstly, as the underlying structure of the entire contents photo, then with a close-up of the fabric details and finally used as intended to wrap something. My knots certainly need some more practice for the sake of elegance.

I wanted to arrange the postcards to show off the art and also the WAVE logo from the exhibition. The surfing postcard was more visually striking so I used that as my front image. 1s 105mm F11 ISO 64.

I definitely learned a lot through doing this. My initial lighting set-up was fairly decent but having a third light on the other (left) side as a kicker would have almost certainly given my images more dimension. Unfortunately, I don’t really have the space to accommodate that. I did also try to use my imagination to make the arrangements as interesting as possible, though they were scruffy. There’s a lot of easy things I could have done like making sure the furoshiki was lying flat, so as not to leave large ugly shadows underneath.

One side of the furoshiki. 1s 105mm F11 ISO 64.

One of the principal warnings from the book were that if you get things wrong while shooting you may end up spending hours in postproduction painstakingly correcting every minor mistake. I certainly got a taste of that. My main issue was the texture of the polystyrene. I had thought, almost correctly, that with overexposure I could wash out all the texture and leave my object sitting on a smooth, pure white surface. However, when backlit the object cast just enough of a shadow in front to cause the texture to come through. I made an effort to brighten the foreground to eliminate this when editing, however this also meant I started to lose the very slight shadow around the base which gives the object dimensionality. Otherwise, it just looks like it’s floating in a sea of white. Solving one problem by creating another.

Wrapping up the daruma box to show off what a furoshiki is typically used for. Unfortunately my knot tying skills leave much to be desired. I also need to have both sides of the knots level with each other to avoid the unequal spill over of backlighting which you can see here. 1s 105mm F11 ISO 64.

When dealing with the larger scene of all the objects I also realised that I simply didn’t have enough workspace to accommodate it, and there was very little surface area in front before you can see the edge of the polystyrene, coupled with huge amounts of headspace and the photo is completely unbalanced. A bit of cropping and cloning helped overcome this, but if I tried to offer this to a client I would be laughed out of the room. Next time I definitely need a larger, smooth, white surface to work on to just save me all that hassle from the get-go.

This is the image I am most happy with. I think the angle and arrangement works really well and the lighting gives it a good sense of dimention. I also think the slight texture actually worked in my favour here, it’s almost like a snow effect. 1s 105mm F11 ISO 64.

I also made this version where I lightened the background to eliminate the texture. It does give the image more contrast but it was a bit of a nightmare trying to get it right and I didn’t do a particularly great job. Getting it right first time in camera make a world of difference. Which version do you prefer? 1s 105mm F11 ISO 64.

The last major thing I realised when editing is that some of the tiny gold wrap on the mizuhiki pin badge was actually damaged, something I missed it at the time of shooting. Perhaps that was due to a handling error, or perhaps it was like that when it arrived, I’m not sure. In this instance I didn’t try to edit it out but if I had been paid then I would have had no choice but to painfully recreate it with photoshop. I certainly have a lot more respect for product photographers, it really pays to get it right first time.

I am sure there’s plenty more I got wrong that I haven’t even noticed but it’s a good start on my journey of understanding. I will certainly be reading more of that book and practicing as a I go along. As ever, the more mistakes I make, the faster I will learn and hopefully it won’t take my that long to overcome the obvious ones.

You can learn more about Japan House London by clicking here.

If you have any comments, questions or tips on product photography then I look forward to reading them in the comments section down below.