Shooting on a white sweep with two lights

Most product photography advice for sellers is either "buy this lightbox" or a studio tutorial written for someone with four heads and a light meter. This is the middle: two lights, a sweep, and a setup you can rebuild identically next week.

The goal is not a beautiful photograph. It is a repeatable one. Forty products shot the same way beat six shot beautifully and thirty-four shot in a hurry.

What you need

• A roll of white paper, 1.35m wide, or a vinyl sweep for anything that might get wet or oily.
• Two lights. Continuous LED panels are easier than flash for this because you see what you get. Around 60W equivalent each is enough for products up to about 30cm.
• Two diffusers. Softboxes if the lights take them, otherwise white shower curtain material at 30cm from the light.
• A tripod. Not optional, and the reason is below.
• Something to weigh down the sweep.

Budget for the whole setup is roughly £150 to £300. That is two to three hours of a retoucher's time.

The setup, in order

Curve the paper, do not fold it. The sweep works because there is no visible horizon line where the background meets the surface. Tape the top to a wall or stand at about 1m and let it curve forward onto the table. The curve should be gentle: a tight fold catches a shadow line exactly where you do not want one.

Put the product 40 to 50cm forward of the curve. This is the single most useful measurement in the whole setup. Closer, and the product's shadow falls on the vertical part of the sweep and darkens the background behind it. Further, and you run out of paper.

Main light at 45 degrees, high. One light, on the left or right, raised above the product and angled down at roughly 45 degrees. This is your key. It does most of the work and creates the shadow that tells a shopper the object is three-dimensional.

Second light opposite, further back, weaker. Not to remove the shadow, to lift it. If your lights have no dimmer, move the second one further away rather than turning it off. A product with no shadow at all looks pasted on, which is exactly what shoppers have learned to distrust.

Both lights aimed at the background as well as the product. This is the part people miss. A background lit only by spill from the product lights will be grey at the corners, and grey corners are what fails Amazon's check. Angle each light so its edge falls on the sweep behind.

Camera settings that hold still

The point is repeatability, so put everything on manual.

• Aperture f/8 to f/11. Enough depth of field that the whole product is sharp, before diffraction starts softening things around f/16.
• ISO at base, usually 100. You have controlled light, so there is no reason to raise it.
• Shutter to taste, since the tripod means you can use 1/15 or slower without a problem.
• White balance manual, not auto. Auto white balance will drift between shots as the product colour changes, so a white sweep photographed behind a red mug and a blue mug comes out two different whites. Set it once from a white card and leave it.
• Shoot RAW if you can. It costs nothing and gives you exposure latitude when a product turns out darker than expected.

The three mistakes that cost a reshoot

Shooting handheld. Not because of blur, because the framing moves. Forty products photographed from forty slightly different heights and distances need forty individual crops. On a tripod they need one.

Exposing for the product. Meter for the background instead, or at least check it. A correctly exposed product against a grey background is a rejected listing; a slightly bright product against a white background is a five-second fix.

Letting the product touch the sweep's curve. The reflection of the paper's curve appears in any glossy surface as a visible line. Move it forward.

How white should the background be in camera?

Aim for the background reading around 240 to 250, not 255.

That sounds wrong, and it is deliberate. A background clipped to pure white in camera has already lost the transition where the product edge meets the background, and that transition is what a background removal tool uses to find the edge. Blow it out in camera and the fine detail is simply gone: fabric edges, hair, wire handles, none of it recoverable.

Shoot slightly under, then take the background to 255 afterwards where the edge information still exists. That is the difference between a background that measures white and one that looks white, and doing it in the right order is most of the battle.

Mark the floor

When the setup works, put tape on the floor at the tripod's legs and at the lights. Photograph the whole setup on your phone.

Next week, when you have eleven new products and forty minutes, you will rebuild it in five minutes instead of forty, and the new photographs will match the old ones, which matters more than either set being perfect.