The Challenges of Manufacturing Photography • Wisconsin Industrial Photographer

Manufacturing photography can have it’s challenges.  I was recently asked by a large manufacturer of automated lasers to take a photo of one of their lasers in action at a metal fabrication facility in Wisconsin.  The shoot had a couple of big hurdles to get around;  the main issue was that in order for the machine to run, it had to be totally enclosed leaving no access to shoot a photo from outside of it.   The unit did have windows, but they were heavily tinted green and darkened down.  You could see through the windows, but getting a quality advertising photography shot would have been a challenge.  

I’ve set up my share of remote cameras working as a sports photographer, but I haven’t had to set up many remote cameras as a midwest manufacturing photographer.  The unit had enough room that we were able to mount a Canon 5D Mark 3 with a 50mm lens inside the machine, and set it into place with a Bogen Super clamp and a Manfrotto Extension Arm.    We had a small port to run a cable out of the machine so we could tether the camera to our laptop computer, monitor our photos and adjust exposure through Abobe Lightroom.  We also mounted two LumaPro LP160 strobes suction cupped into place and triggered them with Pocket Wizards to give the unit some dimension.   We also fired one large, color corrected strobe, a Elinchrom 600 RX with a 30 degree grid, from outside the machine to eliminate the green of the windows, but then we also added some red to just make it a little more sexy.

Here is my favorite photo from the shoot.

Thanks for looking!

Mike