08/17/2026
One of my recent product photography projects, and definitely not the easiest one! 📸
This beautiful and quite expensive antique pool table (from the late 1800s) needed a full set of photos showing the overall piece, craftsmanship, details and condition, along with several clean white-background images for the client’s specific needs.
And this thing was HEAVY! 🙈 Weighing well over 1,000 pounds, it could only be moved around the warehouse with a forklift, so simply repositioning it wherever I wanted for the best lighting or background wasn’t really an option.
Photographing something this large on location is already a challenge, but doing it inside a working and quite dusty warehouse made things a lot more interesting 😁🙈 Besides the limited shooting space and having to carefully work around everything in the warehouse, the table itself created two completely opposite lighting challenges. The beautiful dark side wood absorbed a huge amount of light, while the upper wooden surface reflected it very easily, so getting both properly and evenly lit required quite a bit of experimenting, repositioning and adjusting the lights for different angles.
The white-background images were probably the biggest challenge. The table was simply so large that even my widest background combined with my second reserve background still couldn’t completely cover it. So getting those final clean white-background images required a lot of additional work in post-production as well.
But that’s also part of what makes challenging product shoots interesting. You work with the location and conditions you’re given, figure out the problems as you go, and find a way to get the final result the client needs 📸🤙
Click to see the final images, including the white-background versions, and also a few shots showing what the actual shooting conditions looked like behind the scenes 😁
Most importantly, the client was happy with the final result, which is always the best ending to a challenging shoot! 😎🙌
©️ Hrach Hovhannisyan
🌐 www.hhimage.com
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