Car Parts II

A couple of years ago I started shooting for a company in downtown Akron that makes car parts - specializing in transmission crossmembers. I set up and shot at least a 1000 photos in their warehouse for their website and catalogue. They have an employee who lives near my studio so now whenever they come out with a new part(s) he stops by and drops it off here for me to shoot and picks up whatever I shot the last time. It is a perfect relationship as it allows them to keep their website current and me to do my finest product photography while keeping their costs down.
I show a lot of my event work and hobby photography on the blog - so I wanted to share more of the other type of work I do as well.

In this shot I propped the parts up with some pieces of wax - I then Photoshopped them out.

"Pieces/Parts"

"Why do we still need professional photographers?" - this part is a prototype that the company plans to start offering. The powder coating was pretty scratched up - I used a combination of lighting and Photoshop to clean it up and make it look good.

Shiny metal objects are one of the more difficult things to photograph. The lighting needs to be perfect to show exactly what you are looking at. They are also easier to shoot in the studio where I don't have other colors from the room reflecting off of them. Often times when shooting on location I have to desaturate colors like red and yellow that may be reflecting off the product from things like overhead cranes and whatever else may be around.

Here they wanted to show one of their products in the packaging - I played with the light until I got just the right amount of transparency on the bag.

Another thing that I will do for them is add, change, or remove different logos depending on the product line. This was shot plain and I added the logo after the fact.

So there it is - a little peak into the other half of my world.