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One of the toughest things to photograph on a white background is a light colored object. It is so easy to oversaturate them and make them begin to blur into the background.

In this post we’ll make it even tougher by using a round object.

My tip for this scenario is — light; even more light! (As the posts progress you’ll begin to see this is a reoccurring theme.)

We’ll start with the final image and then work our way from a few trials and errors to how we ended up getting there.

The first thing I tried was just placing the ball in the studio. I use the MyStudio VS36.

In order to not oversaturate the ball the background was too dark. Also, you will notice the horrible shadow thrown from the overhead lighting. This is the complexity of the round object I mentioned. Straight out of the camera the background almost matches the background color of this blog! When adjusted in Photoshop You will notice that it is oversaturated at the top, undersaturated at the bottom where the light doesn’t hit and we are still left with the ugly shadow.

You could stop here and do a bunch of post work in Photoshop to cut the ball out of the background but we would like to avoid as much of that work as possible. Also, think how difficult that would be on the image at the very top of the blog!

So I figured I needed to light the background a little more so I could have the subject less saturated. I use two MyStudio AL2-2 5000K Daylight Fluorescent kits.

Definitely a little better. Still took too much post work to get to this point and still have that harsh shadow at the bottom. We need a way to light to bottom better.

So my next tip is: remove the ground. I’ll go into a few different way’s to do this in future posts. But in this case we will use clear fishing line hanging from the ceiling.

Add a bounce card to reflect some light onto the bottom:

And then just a slight adjustment in Photoshop to get our final image.

Don’t be afraid to think out of the box to get the result you want. In this case I was able to easily hang the object. Maybe you will be able to drop yours and use a strobe. Maybe it is a heavier object that you can suspend in a different way. The ground is a great big obstacle that I love to remove when I can.