My First Time Photographing Footwear
At this point in experimenting with product photography I decided to try making my background completely in photoshop, making it possible to replace it with anything I wanted without placing a computer monitor behind the subject. The technique I used involves taking two exposures. The first I carefully shot the image using two lights, one as a soft light to illuminate the face of the shoe, while the other adds some rimlight to create some additional separation from whatever background I created. For the second exposure the soft light was turned off and the kicker was turned to completely blow out the background white. This meant that I could use the second exposure to make a clean selection of the black area (the shoe), and then cut that selection out of the first exposure leaving me with a perfectly isolated shoe! After all the work coming up with a way to cut out the shoe from the background I ended up deciding to just go with a grey gradient which I could have easily done in camera.
