This article is to help those who want to take pictures of food or products at home without any professional equipment. This is a simple one-lamp setup, shot with a digital compact camera. Here’re the things you need:

1. Camera. But of course. For this shoot I used a Canon G9. It has many advanced functions but any camera that is able to do macro and white-balance adjustment is good enough.
2. Lamp. Tungsten lamp, the type you get from Ikea, is fine.
3. Background. For simplicity I used a white cardboard and my favourite black velvet cloth.
4. Table. To place your product.
5. Tracing paper or translucent cloth

Firstly, turn off the flash. You don’t need this since your source of light is from the lamp. Set your camera white-balance to tungsten mode and you’re pretty much set. To get the best result, customize the white balance of the camera by pointing it to a sheet of white paper, lit by the same source of light. Refer to your manual to get this right. This is the best way to get a completely neutral colour but not many cameras have this function. So now that you’re ready, switch the camera to macro mode (denoted by the flower symbol) and fill the frame with as much of the product as possible. Vary the distance to determine the amount of blur on the far end of the product. Generally the closer you are to the product, the more blur the other parts of the product become.

If you are shooting during the day, you want to make sure that there is no other sources of light, eg window, flourescent, etc, on the product. All other sources of light will introduce different colours. For instance, since your camera white balance is set to tungsten mode, any daylight reflected of your product will look blue. For reflective products, best to shoot in total darkness or find ways to cover your shooting area. Black cloth will do fine.

For the lamp, cover the bulb with tracing paper or a translucent piece of cloth to soften the light. Direct light gives hard shadows which you may not want. The issue with softening the light is you may not have enough light so the shutter speed may have to be really low. Using tripod is an option but it’s quite cumbersome. The other alternative is to replace the bulb with a higher wattage one.

If you have two or more lamps, you can get really creative but start with just one and learn to master it. You may use white pieces of paper to reflect light onto any dark areas to brighten the shadows. If your background is white and there is a lot of it in the frame, eg the picture of the necklace above, increase the exposure compensation will make sure the background looks white and the subject is properly exposed. If in doubt, fire a few frames with different exposure compensation settings and chos the one that looks the best. I used +1EV for that shot.

The third image is a top view of the setup with the watch and the cloth set on the table and the Ikea lamp, covered with cloth.

Read more about getting a white background looking white here.