Shooting Corbeau’s Colourful Racing Seats on a White Background

We’ve got a decent amount of space at the Photography Firm studios but one of our more recent shoots truly tested our capacity for organisational storage. High-end racing seat manufacturer Corbeau commissioned us to shoot a large number of their eye-catching and innovative products, so we put pedal to the metal (well, lens to camera) and obliged. The brief required flawless cutout cleanliness so we shot on a white background, using large, diffused strobe sources for the type of flattering, wrap-around lighting which would avoid hot-spots on some of the more reflective materials, but still reveal form and texture nicely. As ever, faithful colour reproduction was paramount, so we carefully metered and colour checked our setup.

These carefully-crafted beauties suggest high-end precision and we wanted to reflect that in, well, a reflection. Mounting the products onto white perspex creates a glossy mirror which not only gives a grounded counterpoint to the potential “floating product” pitfalls of white background photography, but adds a well-deserved premium sheen to proceedings. Since the client was particular about the angles their creations were to be photographed from, we mounted our perspex shooting surface onto a large, home-made wooden turntable we frequently use (essential for 360 spin shoots) and marked our required angles for quick and easy rotation between shots. Similarly, all elevated shots was done at a fixed height and angle on the always-used-tripod for true consistency across the range. Whenever shooting product photography, especially for e commerce sites such as Amazon, Etsy or Notonthehighstreet.com, consistent shooting angles, focal distances and lighting create a much stronger, unified look for product collections that customers are proven to respond positively to.

The innovative folks at Corbeau know a work desk is no substitute for a race-car but they’ve at least tried to make reading spreadsheets a little more exciting by adapting their bucket seats for the office, so we shot some of their designs with an adaptive plate allowing for the addition of a height-adjustable wheeled based. Imagine our disappointment after the shoot, returning to our boring old, all-black office chair from which we now write this blog…
As ever with product photography, the devil is in the detail so we took care to ensure the wheels sat straight and symmetrically aligned when shooting.

We’d determined with the client pre-shoot that each image was to be retouched to a high standard and cut out for a pure white backdrop, but to save ourselves time and the clients money, we realised we could apply a little photoshop trickery to negate a lot of extra shooting and editing. Certain otherwise-identical designs came in a range of colour options, so by simply shooting individual colour “swatches” of each and then all the necessary angles of ONE chair, we were able to use the colour swap functionality of photoshop to quickly reproduce the full range and save on a whole lot of shooting and cutting out….. if only it was so easy to pimp our own office chairs!

Thanks for reading.