Shooting Products

The first thing is to find a nice shaded place on a good sunny day. your porch is fine for that, and so is your back yard. Next, you need a wall, or a chair or anything you can lean your professional backdrop (A.K.A piece of paper) against.

now tape the paper to the wall/chair and tape it to the floor. TADA!! your seamless backdrop is installed. I used my porch as a shady place and a green table I have as a backdrop mount.

Taping the top of the polypropylene seamless backdrop to the table

A side view of the setup

The next thing you will need is a model. This set up is really good for still life photography or for taking product shots (for eBay.com, or for stock agencies like Fotolia). For this tutorial, I used my daughter's caterpillar toy.

Shutter speed and aperture- If you have a good sunny day, you can go up and nice with the shutter speed. All the caterpillar pictures here were taken with F/8 and shutter speed of 1/200-1/400.

Here is one picture taken at this "homemade studio"

Multi-color seamless backdrops - To add some interest to the pictures, I use several sheets of paper and polypropylene, each with different color. This way, I have instant multi-color backdrops.

My roll of papers - each color a different backdrop

Here are two more pictures taken with the homemade studio setup:
(a RED backdrop and a BLUE backdrop - both polypropylene)

And here is another picture taken some time ago utilizing the home studio setup
(white polypropylene as my seamless backdrop)

Good luck with your still life studio,

Thanks to www.diyphotography.net