Grammar School Art Class Comes in Handy

When deciding on a background for his product shot, I had a sheet of yellow foam core that matched the container perfectly. I thought it would be great to experiment with a yellow on yellow image. However, having only a small rigid piece of the foam core at my disposal, my concern was carrying that color under the product so the container would be grounded in the image and pick up the soft shadows from the light source. I could have easily shot it on a white sweep and applied the color in Photoshop afterwards but this being a photography blog and not a Photoshop blog, I wanted to get as much of the shot right in camera with little or no post.  I had a couple of other color sheets of foam core but only one sheet of yellow.  Then it it hit me! Looking at the orange in the cap of the container and the Tide logo on the product, instead of doing an all yellow background, why not try bringing in a touch of orange to the background to compliment the packaging. Sounds great right??? There was only one problem, I didn't have a sheet of orange foam core but I did have a red one. This is where lessons learned in a grammar school art class come in handy. Mixing the primary colors of red and yellow gives you orange. That sounds great but how do I mix two rigid sheets of foam core together? Here is where a little magic happens.

My light source was daylight from a large window camera left. Being that the red and yellow pieces of foam core were at a 90 degree angle, the yellow background sheet, cast just enough of a reflection on the bottom red sheet to create orange. It was a cloudy day so I set I my camera's white balance accordingly which rendered the exact color temperature. Other than a a slight curve applied in Lightroom, this is pretty much what it looked like straight out of camera. In the end, opting to bring that second color solved all my issues and in my opinion, added more dimension and a cohesive color balance to the image.