How to work in the studio as a Commercial photographer- Sophie Traynor

The University of Huddersfield invited Sophie Traynor, a professional freelance photographer, to give us a studio workshop on how she works in the industry. From cameras to lighting and studio set ups.

Her three main genres within photography are product, food, and portrait. we learnt about how she works with product and portraits specifically in this workshop. A piece of advice she mentioned was that having knowledge in a mixture of different types of photography gives yourself an advantage because you can use your wide skillset on one shoot. For example, if you are briefed a makeup product like foundation, you can photograph this as normal but having knowledge in portrait photography means that you could bring a model in and photograph them wearing the product. This might mean the brand is more likely to use you again but also gets you a lot more work in the industry as you have various skills rather than just being to one type of photography

Product photography

when capturing details in products, such the logo or the texture, Sophie likes to use a 100mm Macro lens. This focuses right on the product without having to worry about too much background space. She brought in a perfume bottle for this demonstration, starting off with just one light, keeping it as simple as possible which was another tip of hers.

A photograph by me taken live from the workshop captures one of the many images taken by moving the product around creating different shadows and changing camera angles are all important ideas in constructing a professional style image. For example, for this shot she had moved the light closer to the bottle to make the shadow more prominent. When you have found the right placement of how you want the product to be on the background, she mentioned that using white tac was a good idea especially if the background is white too. This is to stop the product from moving around.

This is another image showing how she uses live view on Capture One to move products round in shot instead of moving them around, having to take a picture and moving them around again. The products being used here are nail polish. As they are small and rounded the white tac came in handy, especially as some of them are placed on the side. Sometimes Sophie must take up to 5 images and layer in post-production to be able to create the final image. This is something else to think about in a professional practice.

Portrait Photography

Using a student to model for this section of the workshop, this captures the setup that was used here. One octobox quite close to the subject to give some brightness to the face and capture detail in the skin. The skills taken from this can be forwarded onto my own practice as I mainly work with models within my work.

She mentioned that if it’s a fashion shoot, maybe a sport one using a 24mm lens makes limbs look really long so if you try and take a shot from a low angle and get them to swing their leg the shoe is going to look huge. This is a different approach to a standard portrait. Another tip when on a shoot is making the model laugh which loosens them up and makes it easier for the photographer to capture emotion and this is what is needed because having a straight face isn’t always going to sell.

The advice given in this workshop was very helpful as it wasn’t just about the technical side of working in photography, she answered questions about having a whole team of people watching and it being all up to you to make everything look perfect however she just ignored this and gets on with it.