White Wood Background – perfect for mockup photos and flatlays
I’m going to kick off this site with a blog post – not my original intention but I discovered a product this week which I am very excited about and I thought i would share with you here!
I sell a lot of gold foil prints in my shop CraftyCowDesign.co.uk and I have found photographing gold foil extremely challenging. The reason being (and bear with me as I am not a professional photographer so may not get the terms quite right!!) is that my objective is to get a lovely crisp white page with sparkly reflective foil showing the lovely colour and reflection of the foil. However due to the fact that foil is reflective it reflects light back into the camera/phone it means that I either end up with a lovely foiled image but a dark background or a very overexposed foiled area which doesn’t show the foiling. This is exacerbated if I use a background that is not white such as this :
Problems with photographing foil
So there are lots of tips and tricks around this, which I will discuss on the website and in future blog posts, In this particular case however I think I wasn’t being helped by the background of my image which is a wood texture wallpaper sample in a light grey/brown tone. (The samples I get are free from my local DIY store in the UK – I get a piece which is around 1.5m long); I therefore came to the conclusion that what I really need is a white wood background sample – and I’ve searched everywhere but I’ve not been able to come across one (without having to buy lots of wallpaper!!!);
And here’s what I discovered…
So I had a look on amazon this week and came across this fab white wood background product (click here for the USA Link) which makes an ideal white wood background for photography! It is a self adhesive roll of white wood background effect vinyl which is 45cmx300cm in size (17.7x10ft); Mine was £7.98 when I bought it ($8.98 in the USA at time of printing) which I think is very reasonable given the size of it.
This is what it looks like :
White Wood Background Self Adhesive Vinyl
White Wood Background ideal for product photography
With this I intended to make a fake White Wood Background – I got a piece of left over plasterboard from the garage (in the USA this is called drywall); My particular piece was a bit ragged around the edges however as it was large this wasn’t too much of a problem as the edges aren’t going to show in the photos I take. I then applied the vinyl to my plasterboard :
Wooden Background – white wood mockup background
White Wood Texture Background for Product Photography
Pretty cool huh? Obviously a nice even bit would look better but hey I’m pleased with the result.
Next as this is a movable piece I balanced it on some toys (!), as that is what I had to hand, facing the window to get some natural light and photographed it at an angle to get some nice reflections as well as much light as I could (it was a cloudy day so the light was naturally diffused to a degree). I don’t think it would work in sunlight as it would be way too bright!
product photography ideas with my white wood background
The outcome :
So this doesn’t look so impressive but here is one of the pics I got with this setup – I think my fake White Wood Background looks pretty cool and really I don’t think you can tell it’s fake :
White Wood Background – photographing gold foil prints
It’s 100% perfect in anyway – I’m still learning – but much better than the example at the top I think!
Have you had problems with product photography – especially highly reflective backgrounds? Please comment below with any tips and hints as I’d love to hear them (no spam please though – I do check!).
