Guest Author

Ashveen Maheshwari is a Product Designer from IISc Bangalore. He is a great photography enthusiast. Thanks to Ashveen for contributing this article. He is available in Twitter as @ashmec

Many people I know are worried that they don’t have a good camera. To be precise, any camera is not a limitation. Photographers such as Terry Richardson (a well known fashion photographer) have made their career starting with cameras no better than a Kodak KB10. Great photography is not limited by the instruments at your disposal. Instruments do give you more options, but that is no limit for an artist’s imagination.

Photography: An art or craft?

When photography was started in late 1800s, it was not considered as an art form. By and large it was thought as a craft. Photographs were not even considered to get a place in art museums. Eventually, after a long series of efforts by artists, it got its place and was regarded as an art form.

Some pointers for better photography

Errors are of two kinds- either deliberate action or careless mistake. Calling a careless mistake an art is what I don’t find very convincing. Even that can become an artistic expression. On the other hand, deliberate actions are the ones that add value to the overall picture and its emotion. Many photographers and artists use them extensively throughout their work so much so that the work is identified by the kind of error it has in it.

Here are some pointers that I observed over time doing photography and watching others do it. I hope these will help.

Unwanted objects

While we shoot in real life, there are always unwanted objects in a frame that can spoil the picture. Here is my tip: Either take the picture in a way that all the clutter becomes a part of the scene or you reconfigure the angle to avoid them.  Yes, Photoshop is always there.

There are many objects that do not directly relate to the subjects.

This looks better and has more impact.

Improper perspectives

When we take pictures at an angle, the perspective gets affected. Try to avoid perspective distortion using tilt shift lens. If the subject is small and you want them to look as they are (no cartooning), then taking pictures at right angles is a good idea.

Here, as the perspective is wrong, the figure looks clearly distorted while it was not intended to be.

Unwanted Shadows

To avoid shadows like this, you can also use flash.

Subject not emphasized properly

Care should be taken so that the original subject gets enough attention.

Here, the person goes to the background and the big projection screen becomes the subject.

Lighting

• Natural lighting will give you great pictures if the light source remains on your back. You may do exactly reverse of this to get silhouette effect which is equally cool. Sometimes, angular lighting may also add value.
• While shooting with flash and studio light, it’s all in your control and you can get whatever effect you want.
• Best time for taking pictures in natural light is between sunrise and 10.00 AM or between 5.00PM and sunset. Weather is also to be taken into account.

Abstract

• True abstract pictures are pictures that can’t be directly related to any worldly object. They usually convey a mood or an overall meaning. This meaning may differ from person to person.
• Just look around you and you will be amazed to see how much possibilities are there for abstracts. You may introduce deliberate errors for getting some abstract pictures.
  
  This image was taken with a long exposure. The three colors from three t-shirts that I was waving along with my camera. The image conveys ‘American Dream.’

Other Points

• All simple principles that are related to graphic design like Gestault theories are relevant to photography as well. You can make use of them while taking pictures.
• Your work may have an objective.  So you may give it a little thought, sometimes this happens during the shooting process itself. The idea keeps evolving as you move forward with the photo shoot.
• Don’t be shy as you take pictures. You may need to touch your models and ask them to do crazy things, you yourself might need to be in odd positions while you take pictures. Just do it.
  
  This model’s hair is pinned on to the notice board and he is made to do all sorts of crazy poses. Model: Urvesh
• Photographers pursue beauty. Beauty is not Angelina Jolie; it is in everyone and everything you see. You just need to have the right eye for it. None of your models or objects can be ugly or filthy, at least they should not look like that to you while you stay behind the camera.I found this doll in the junk yard.
  
  To me the picture says “Recycle before They Haunt You.”
• It’s a good idea to make the models feel at ease. Start a conversation, crack jokes and refrain from criticizing them if something goes wrong.
• The number of best pictures in any shoot will be usually low. You will take lots of pictures and very few from them will satisfy you. So don’t worry, just shoot. Digital memory is very cheap compared with raw film rolls.
• Shoot everything that is around you. You can get amazing pictures from objects that look just ordinary. Ordinary objects may produce extraordinary impact.
  
  This is a mineral water bottle filled with water. There is a yellow Gold Flake cigarette pack behind it. The camera flash made an effect of fire in the bottle.
• Yes, your cameras are costly equipments. But if you are too cautious about the camera’s safety, you may miss a lot of great pictures.
• Experiment, experiment, experiment… You will get nice pictures.

Here are some of my favorite photographers.

• Steven Meisel
• Philippe Halsman
• Lee Miller
• Nobuyoshi ARAKI
• Terry Richardson
• Margaret Bourke White
• Spencer Tunick
• Ellen Von Unwerth
• Man Ray
• And of course, National Geographic guys — so many amazing and amazing pictures.

Hope you liked this blog post. And, congrats to AnasKA | antzFx for his long lasting blog.

Guest Author

Urvesh Avinash Bharambe is a Product Designer from IISc Bangalore. He is a great photography enthusiast. Thanks to Urvesh for contributing this article. Urvesh is available in Twitter as @UrveshDesigns

Everyone loves to have control over the situation in which they are present. People like dictating their own terms. Same applies to the field of photography too. You wait for the perfect sunlight to come up, so that you can take beautiful portraits of your model, or you can have the soft diffused uniform light on the flowers and get the beautiful saturated colours out of them. People wait for that few minutes at the dusk or the dawn to get the flattering light that make the picturesque landscapes.

Most of the time, light may not in your control; it’s in the hands of Mother Nature, unless you own a dozen of SB-900s that can turn the day-shot into a night-shot and vice versa. There is one realm of photography where it is not only important to have control over the light, but you have to depend on artificial source of light to have a creative control over what pops up on your LCD when you press the shutter of your camera.

Here I come up with one of my first encounters in this realm of photography called as Product Photography.

The Product

After the successful prototyping of the Centenary Pro Guitar by Arunkumar Francis, it was the time to put it into presentable form to give due justification to the efforts that went in coming up with this guitar. A product is said to be incomplete unless it is presented well. To put it in different words, the design is incomplete if it is not conveyed properly to its users. A proper presentation here meant, getting exactly similar photographs of the product as per the initial renderings made.

Initial Renderings in 3D Software

The important point that one should keep in mind while photographing products is to take full shots which will show the overall product and in addition to this, to highlight the special features, one should take shots that concentrates on these peculiar parts. Here the first two shots are the ones, which highlight the key features of the product, while the third shot is to give the complete view of the product.

The Challenge

This was important so as to justify that the final outcome is similar to what you had conceived initially. Imagining things and coming up with new ideas is not that difficult compared to bringing it into realization and to be able to convey it to the audience effectively. It is said that “A picture is worth a thousand words”. So now it was the time to prove this quote to be true. No words, only a picture and that should be able to present as many details of the product as possible.

The brief for this photo-shoot was slightly different, as here apart from getting the maximum details out of the product in a single photograph, it was important to get the exact views as that of the initial renderings of the product. Seeing my enthusiasm and interest in experimenting with different photographic techniques, Arunkumar Francis asked me if I would be able to do this. I was confident but at the same time was nervous too as there were some expectations involved, unlike my experiments where I get delighted at unexpected outcomes also!

The Setup

It was decided to carry out the shoot during the night time, after dinner so that we can have complete control over the lighting. I promised to bring all my equipment along with tripod. The setup was cleaned of dust and the roll of seamless paper was spread over the table. We had two Prolinchrom 23 studio lights with soft-boxes with us to do the photo-shoot. Then the Centenary Pro Guitar was cleaned so as to leave no fingerprints or daubs on the shiny surfaces of the guitar. And then with utter care, this guitar was placed on the setup table. Arunkumar Francis had the required photos of the rendering in his mobile, which we were using as a portable digital frame to have an idea of the lighting and the required perspective of the product. This proved to be better than using a laptop, as it was handy and did not give bright light, which on the other hand would have demanded more time from our eyes to accommodate to the darkness.

Just one month back before this photoshoot, I had bought an AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 D lens, which gives the perspective of the human eye (on full-format sensors of course), which may prove to be good for product photography (You would not want your beautiful guitar to be distorted, right?) and being a fast lens, it was good for night photography and blurring out the background for portraits too. So in all, I felt that this was a good investment for me as a beginner in photography, apart from this being few of the lenses that I could afford buying from the saving that I make from my scholarship. Now I was eager to try out some “real” product photography and so put on this lens on my camera body and setup the lamps arbitrarily on the two sides of the tables. But later on the position of the light strobes was changed, so as to get minimum amount of shadows of the product on the table base as possible. (Similar to the floating objects on black background or on seamless white backgrounds seen in the hoardings and similar displays).

Capturing the first view

When the exact perspective and the view of the guitar was achieved, the lights were moved to do some fine adjustment, so as to get all the details on the guitar, which included, the body, the fret, the pickups, the bridge, all the knobs, and the main feature being the newly designed aluminum turning pegs for tuning and last but never the least were “curves on the body”.

On to the second view

So at this point, the first photograph out of the three required views was achieved and was left for later processing in the digital darkroom (read Photoshop editing). Now the second view from the front of the side of the headstock was to be taken.

For the second shot, we tried lot of iterations, like bringing camera near the headstock, to give the exaggerated view of the headstock and comparatively smaller body, but all was in vain.

The view as seen in our digital photo-frame (read mobile) was not achieved. Then I realized that we can get this kind of distortion using a wider focal length. The peculiarity of this normal prime lens was to not to give any kind of distortion, and this is what was stopping us from getting the required view. So now I put on my AF-S DX Nikkor 18-55mm f /3.5-5.6G ED II, which is a kit lens that used to come with the entry level Nikon DSLRs. Nowadays they supply a VR version of this lens, but the one without ED (extra-low dispersion) elements, which in a way is a good strategy for Nikon to gain more money for a not-so-better lens.

Now after putting this lens, I could get the required perspective view of the guitar and then achieving the required lighting was an easy task.

One point that should be taken into consideration for this kind of product photography is to keep the aperture at its minimum, i.e. at maximum f number, so as to have the complete product into focus. Also when you focus, you should choose the focus point (out of 3, 9, 11, 51 or whatever number of focus points you have), that falls at around 1/3rd of the length of your product or try to focus at 1/3rd the length of the scene. This will help you get optimum depth of field for the aperture that you have chosen. One more point to be taken into consideration is that the shadows don’t show up around the product, you can either arrange the lights in a manner that will help fill all the shadows or else try elevating the product from the surface of the table; this will throw the shadow below the product. Here in this setup we had used the lens cap (shown in the picture below) to lift the Guitar’s fret so that no hard shadows are formed around that.

The Last Shot Standing

Finally the last shot was left in which we had to show the complete view of the guitar. For this we wanted a view from an elevated place, so as to maintain the normal perspective of the guitar, or in other words to get a bird’s eye view unlike the distorted perspective view. We did not have any camera boom stand or crane, so the easiest way was to climb a chair and take the photograph.

First shot was taken, the perspective and view was the one that was desired, but the image looked flat. All the details were not clearly visible. The details like fret, pickups, bridge, volume and tone controls were all visible, but the shape of the guitar or the curves cut on the guitar that are the characteristic features of the product were not visible.

Now there were two options with us, either to arrange the lights in such a way that you get the required reflections from these surfaces, but then there are chances that the other arrangements or the fine adjustments, that you had done to throw the shadows away, are disturbed. The other option is to use the reflective cards or white boards, which can be a thermocol sheet, a flute board, a white sheet of paper, which will give different kind of reflections based on their surface properties. For e.g., a thermocol sheet will give a diffused light and a smooth reflection, while a flute board, having a shiny surface will give hard reflections on the surface. Now by holding the white sheet in different orientations the required details are ‘carved out’ on the body of the product.

As shown below, you can see the step by step improvement in the details that are seen on the surface contours.

All the ones till here are having a slight warmer tone, while the one in the reference image was having a cooler tone, this was achievable by two ways, changing the white balance in the camera or else editing it later in the digital darkroom. The last image above shows the perfect details of the guitar giving details of the complete curves on the body, but the one shown below was to be achieved as it resembled the reference rendering. The difference between two is shown in the picture below.

Well done, boy …

The final shot chosen by the client is the one shown below.

One thing I felt during the whole shoot is that it would have been better if we had a wider paper roll, so that we could have avoided using the clone-stamp tool to extend the white surface.

Now the Urvesh Touch : Light Painting

Finally we got the shot which was similar to the rendering in our digital frame and my client was happy with the results. We could get the 3 images which were exactly similar to the initial renderings of the product. Now it was time for some fun shooting and before I could request Francis to keep the guitar there for some more time for me to try out some more shots, he himself told me to try anything crazy that I would like to try. I usually carry a torch with me in my camera bag, so I thought of trying light-painting the guitar. Here are the results of the light-painting the guitar in the complete darkness.

The recipe for this kind of shot is as follows:

1. Lock the focus on the Guitar when the room is lit, or you can use the auto-focus assist lamp to help focusing.
2. Switch off the lights, so that no unwanted light is there in the scene.
3. Go for bulb exposure in your camera, or if the bulb mode if not there go for a exposure of 10 sec or similar (based on trial and error) that may be sufficient for you to paint the guitar with light.
4. Release the shutter and start painting the guitar with the torch light. Make sure to conceal the light source, otherwise you will end up with the intermittent streaks of lights in the scene (which obviously looks bad, unless you want them intentionally).
5. Don’t forget to end the exposure (if in bulb mode) or wait till the shutter is closed, before you switch on the lights.

Last, but not the least

In the end, my deepest gratitude to AnasKA (antzFx), (my friend, my classmate, my project partner, my mentor and my critic for all my works) who has been after me since last 1.5 year, advising me to start a blog, and now for giving me a head-start by providing an opportunity to write in his blog. Thanks to Arunkumar Francis (my senior at CPDM, IISc, an ideal Product Designer and my daily dose of inspiration), for entrusting the photography of his wonderful work – Guitar on me and thanks to Amardeep Singh, (my friend, my room-mate and my companion in all my photo-shoots), without whom I would not have been able to write this blog entry, if he would not have covered the entire event. Thanks to my department, Centre for Product Design & Manufacturing (CPDM), Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (for purchasing Prolinchrom 23 studio lights; this is one of the good things that they did in past), for letting me use the studio lights and the seamless paper roll. Thanks to my Mom and my family for buying me a Nikon D40 DSLR, which proved to be my stepping stone into exploring the beautiful realm of photography. Some people like to have a step by step kind of tutorial, but this being my first blog, I wanted to keep it in the narrative form and take readers through this encounter of making pictures, rather than just taking pictures.

My ultimate homage to my Guruani, Dr. Natasha Mhatre, whom I have considered as my Guru (though she doesn’t know this till now; I tried to be Eklavya ) and try to replicate her style and derive inspiration from her.

Download the ‘CPDM Illustrated’ newsletter from here (PDF, 2.3MB).
Download the High Quality Version of the same from here (PDF, 11.3MB).

The three generations
It is decided to devote pages for three batches of M.Des. Students with contact information.

1. 2007-2009 Batch who are no longer in the institute and have started their career in various organizations. The farewell group photo of this batch is included.
2. 2008-2010 Batch (Final year students) has done summer internship in different reputed companies. Their internship work is featured in the news letter.
3. 2009-2011 Batch (First Year Students): Since they are the newcomers, I asked them to e-mail me any work they have done in the past. So I got a lot of good works like photographs, drawings, paintings, collages…

The cover
I started the layout pixel by pixel and word by word. In the cover, I wanted to showcase the idea of ‘pixel’ as a basic building block. This led me to choose a photograph of a yellow flowered tree in our campus (Photo: Urvesh Bharambe). The image was rotated 90 degrees clockwise and the ‘stained glass’ filter is applied. Two versions are made by using white and black as the cell wall colour. I finally chose the black cell wall color.

The font of ‘CPDM Illustrated’ was retained from the first issue of the news letter (Designer: Arunkumar Francis). CPDM logo was dropped from the design and a round post-it sticker is used to denote ‘Issue +2.’ A transparent ‘Seal King’ like band was added to make the newsletter look unopened.

Page Layout

A clear heading and subheading are present on almost all the pages. Images are surrounded by a halftone patterned frame in grey and light yellow. The contents of the pages have 5 degrees of tilt. This tilt and the presence of ample white space in a page favour marginalia. As footer, a small band of single layered cells of the stained glass pattern is placed. Full page photographs are used to separate the three sections.

Software: InDesign, Photoshop
Design Date: 11-Nov-2009

Organized Trade: End Caps

Emerging Channels: Interactive Kiosks

Token of appreciation received for the designs

Greg Norman T-shirt

Dhoni & Ishant USB Memory Sticks (1GB)

Fastrack Sunglasses

Software: SolidWorks, Photoshop
Design Date: 31-Oct-2009

‘SunFlow’ is an LED (Light Emitting Diode) Solar Lantern designed and prototyped by Geo Paul and I. The lamp on the left (Orange color) is a 3D rendered model and the one on the right (Yellow color) is the final working prototype.

We did 3D solid modelling, impact analysis, electronics design and integration testing.

Anas K A and Geo Paul with ‘SunFlow’ prototype
(Photo Courtesy: Urvesh Bharambe)

Software: SolidWorks, Photoshop
Design Date: Project finished on 8-Dec-2009

I won third prize for this design that can be placed on the dining tables.

Design thoughts
In Kerala, snake boats are traditionally used for boat races and ceremonies related with temples. Miniature models of snake boats and Kathakali faces are the most gifted items or souvenirs from Kerala.

In the place of oars, holes are provided for lacing the toothpicks. Space between two toothpicks are sufficient for picking one easily. Provisions are provided for placing menu cards, if this design is used in hotels.

Judge’s comment
Amit Dongre, Desmania Design, New Delhi
“WOW is clear as the Indian form is used with good usability. I can imagine that the South Indian restaurants can use this happily and the customers will relate to it instantly. If the menu cards were like flags, it would have been even better. Picking the toothpick seems easier. The form will look great on dinner table.”

Acknowledgments
The background image used is ‘Attorney’s table in a courtroom’ by Jason Morrison, US.

Software: SolidWorks, Photoshop
Design Date: 20-Nov-2009

Software: SolidWorks, Photoshop
Design Date: 13-Nov-2009

Thus ‘dpe’ was born. ‘dpe’ means ‘Design | Participate | Excel.’ I made plans for a teaser kind of series ads to generate interest among the students.

Following are the three posters that were circulated as e-mails, one poster a day.

Notice the transition of background color and the change in the point of view of the box. ‘Provocative’ wordings like ‘We are second to none’ and ‘You are not a designer till you take part in this competition’ are coined and used. The box is open in the third poster only. The box and the alphabets are 3D modelled in SolidWorks software. We received quite a good number of responses for the first contest.

Software: SolidWorks, Photoshop
Design Date: 10-Nov-2009

The alphabet ‘M’ in the department name ‘CPDM’ is modified to resemble a heart or love symbol. Using appropriate color coding, the message can be read in two ways. It can be either ‘I am in CPDM’ or ‘I am in love with design.’

Originally, I wanted this graphic to appear above the heart of a person when he wears the T-shirt. Some of my friends decided that the graphic should be bigger and so it got printed on the rear side of the T-shirt. The front side of the T-shirt has the following words: ‘Student of Product Design, CPDM.’

Pankaj Upadhyay (The organizer) and I (The winner)

The other five
Here are my other five design submissions, in no particular order:

Ripples

Could you recognize a ‘cpdm?’ ‘Ripples’ is the name of the Annual Design Degree Show in our department.

IISc and CPDM

Car

‘U’ r here!

Department Building

Software: Adobe Illustrator
Design Dates: 08 to 28-Mar-2009
T-shirt released on: 01-Oct-2009

Click here to download the CPDM Placement Brochure 2010 (PDF, 426KB) »

The task was challenging, as design is highly subjective. Everybody had ideas on how the brochure should look like and selling my idea to them was difficult.  It was a great learning experience because some observations made by my design friends helped me to see areas that I overlooked.

Here are the design decisions I made while designing this brochure.

Requirements
Following are the requirements I fixed for the brochure.

• The look and feel of the brochure should be formal. Because it will be sent to corporate companies and they should not take us lightly as a bunch of kids who know drawing.
• There should be a subtle touch of playfulness. This is the main reason for using a doodle logo on the front page as opposed to the official version. One of the inside pages features a character illustration by a fellow student.
• Samples of student work – 10 designs — are featured on all the 12 pages including cover. This will be a temptation for visiting the student portfolios.
• CPDM is a younger department in IISc and many people don’t know the existence of this Master in Design Course in Product Design. So, an introduction to the department, M.Des. Course Structure, Faculty Profile, Student profile of 2010 Batch… are added to the brochure.
• A very clean and structured layout is used for the brochure.

The Layout

1. Picture band – One student work is featured per page.
2. Sidebar – Sentences that need immediate attention are featured here. Font size is larger than the body text. A lighter version of the main color palette is used as the background.
3. Body text area – The title and descriptions run here.
4. Footer – This area is practically empty and features the main color palette. Various shades of grey, a dull flesh colored brown were tried before fixing the present fresh yellow color.
5. The facing page also features the same layout, but the features are mirrored to give a sense of equilibrium and stability.

Featured Works
Following are the works that are featured in this brochure.

The watch — Sharath Kumar

The Torch — Pavan Sridharan & AnasKA

The Refrigerator — Renjith Koshy John & Urvesh Avinash Bharambe

The Washing Machine — Sharath Kumar & AnasKA

BMW — Renjith Koshy John (A wireframe of this model also feature on the front cover).

Audi — Pankaj Upadhyay (A wireframe of this model also feature on the back cover).

The Bamboo Chair — Pankaj Upadhyay

Highway Mohawks — Pankaj Upadhyay

‘Sagat’ The Super Hero — Pankaj Upadhyay

‘I am in Love with design’ — AnasKA

I hope that all the 17 students of 2010 Batch will find good jobs with design studios and corporate companies.

Software: Adobe InDesign
Design Date: 07-Aug-2009