Photography... It's all about problem solving... Mostly.

A client wants his heating product shot in an airing cupboard, with no hot water tank,  apparently it's something to do with if you have a combination boiler installed you lose the hot water tank. So having check with numerous people I know none of them has a combination boiler, or a converted airing cupboard, so I was getting a bit stuck.

Now professional photography is not all f-stops and shutter speeds, no, photography is about problem solving, I solved the problem by first making a false floor from laminated flooring, with a couple of battens glued under it to hold it together, then with the aid of a couple of small stands and studio clamps I floated the flooring on top of the hot water tank in my airing cupboard.

The heater required mounting on the wall, another problem to solve as there was no way I was going to start drilling holes in my cupboard walls, so I made a small jig out of plywood and some small battens, the heater was being shot with, and without a grill cover, the one supplied was the wrong size, so I had to cut it down, take a shot of it one way around, then flip it over and take another shot, photoshop the layers together and remove the unwanted cut end, I also had to remove the wooden battens from the image to, fiddly, but doable.

I used a single light, an old Bowens Prolite 60 (250W) with a 90cm Octabox attached, the stand was perched at the top of the stair, I'm so glad we've not removed the stair gate from when the boys were younger, it stopped the whole lot from ending up smashed at the foot of the stair.

Shot on the Canon 5D MkIII, supported by my trusty old Manfrotto tripod, using an electronic cable release, and iShoot transmitter and receiver.

The carpet and door were photographed by lowering the light and taking the camera down to floor level, but keeping the head angle the same, the image was then stripped-in in photoshop.

These are the images the client was after, it just took me a little more time to achieve than they, or I had envisaged.

Above, the same product but shot on a white background, the lighting was provided by two Bowens Espirt Gemini 500 heads, shod with 35cm x 140cm stripboxes, and mounted on Manfrotto heavy duty stands with 40 inch boom-arms.

All images ©2014 Alistair Kerr Photography