How do you shoot a rod? Advice, Please.

[brandon simmons]

I’ve recently been inspired to photograph the decals on some my glass rods. It has proved more difficult than I anticipated and I come to you for help.

I cheated my way through photography class in college (ya Zack, Hendrix) and now I am paying the consequences.

Fly art studio has been a helpful resource and I was wondering if you happen to have any other tips or websites.

My gear is minimal- I have the same set up as the Shooting-on-a-Budget tutorial: an Olympus Stylus 770SW waterproof point-and-shoot. I have invested in a small tripod and have been pleased with my fly reel shots. But my hurdle is trying to capture the text/graphic due to the curvature of the rod.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Brandon

[Chad Simcox]

I’d shoot with the rod parallel to the lens. This would cut down on any distortion caused by perspective. Then you’re just dealing with the curve of the rod, which you’re not really going to be able to do anything about if you want the photo to look natural. You could shoot multiple shots and slightly rotate the rod with each shot, then combine them in Photoshop. Much like the way tattoo artist photograph sleeves or other tatts that wrap around body parts. That would give you better detail of the graphics/text but would look unnatural.

http://society6.com/grainfarmer Fly Fishing and Landscape open edition Photography prints.

http://grainfarmer.vsco.co/ iPhone photos
http://instagram.com/chad_simcox Instagram

[David Anderson]

You could start with setting the zoom in roughly the middle of the range, and shoot straight down onto the rod on a simple background.
I’m not sure of the zoom range on your camera, but was thinking in the 50-70mm range eqv. on a full frame 35mm.

For light you want flat & even – diffused daylight would be the easiest.

I try to keep backgrounds simple with stuff like rods as not to distract.

www.dsaphoto.com

A picture is thousand words that takes less than a second while a thousand words is a picture that takes a month.

[Neal Osborn]

To add to the comments above by David and Chad . . . Even bad product shots of decals can be made to look good in photoshop when done as a composite.

Here is an example of my Scott F 7033.  These were shots I took early in my photography learning curve.  I wanted to show the label/graphics but couldn’t get a good clean picture because of flash/halo/bleed/warp.  So I gave up.  After reading your post I decided to go back to the pictures and instead of trying to ring water from a dry rag I focused on compositing the pictures with photoshop layers and added a nice little brook stream on the left to suggest the rod is best suited for this type of fishing. Below is the final composite followed by the original crappy pictures which were cut up and blended into the final.  I would be happy to do something similar for you, Brandon, if you send me some images of your rod.

Originals

[olle bulder]

Or like this.

[Author]

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