Industrial Product Photography in San Diego
I have been doing commercial industrial photography in San Diego for over 25 years, but I have only shot industrial product photography for about six years. It started when a client asked if I could shoot some industrial products, though I had no industrial products in my portfolio. I said “yes” and told her what my price was. When she called back and asked me why I was more expensive than the other photographers she spoke with, I said, “You can expect the images that I produce to be of equal quality to the images on my website.
The product, for Haskel Industries, was a large black gas compressor with a glossy surface, which I knew had to be lit indirectly with large surfaces. Just like I learned on set with a working with someone who shot product photography in San Diego early in my career. Since I have been working as a photographer for so long, I have learned a lot from my colleagues in other genres of photography, like basic principles and an understanding of how light works on surfaces and how you achieve lighting characteristics. So I took the job and made her a repeat client. Most of my large clients are repeat clients because I put everything I have learned in diverse fields of photography into the industrial project I am working on.
I don’t take commercial photography jobs for which I don’t have the appropriate expertise, and when I get a job shooting industrial product photography that is slightly outside of my expertise, I lean on a network of photographers who do have the expertise, like in the first image in the series.
Such a job was for Relativity Space, which makes rocket housings and engines. That had a twenty-five-foot-tall robotic welder that makes rocket housings, and wanted to show it off. I had been on sets where they photograph cars, so I knew I was going to need a large light source to get the black surface to glow, and I would need to shoot the welder in plates. Since I only had theoretical knowledge of lighting an object of that size, I brought in assistants who had practical knowledge of lighting movie sets and car shoots. We illuminated the welder with a 20 X 20 ft. translucent cloth and 10,000 watts of power on two 20 ft. stands. The whole thing took about 10 hours to shoot, and it was one of the most elaborate sets I have ever shot.
Similarly, in image number five, we were shooting for a 16-foot-long complex flooring structure for a NASA project. The company, another Aerospace manufacturing company in San Diego, wanted it to look beautiful, so we used large surfaces to light the structure on a black surface. My greatest resource is my experience, and it comes with me on all of my shoots, no matter how small.
I shot a particularly interesting product ( last image): an Ion Cyclone with an ionized plasma vapor reaction for Astro Forge, a commercial asteroid mining startup. We used small speed lights and reflectors to be efficient because we had to shoot many setups that day.
Most of my industrial product photography is done on location, but occasionally I shoot products in a studio when the products are small enough, and sometimes, if the budget is limited, I will photograph products by myself, like in the very last image of industrial boilers.
I have a versatile skill set, including editorial and corporate portraiture and architectural photography. Finally, I am not limited to industrial photography in San Diego. I travel throughout California to cities including San Francisco, Riverside, San Bernardino, Long Beach, Pasadena, and Santa Barbara.
