In eCommerce photography, there is a particular focus on the production speed of images. The price for this is often a more generalised lighting approach that cannot respond individually to different objects.

In contrast, in high-end advertising photography, lighting is fiddled with for a very long time until the object to be advertised is perfectly staged - set-ups created in this way are then, however, practically unusable for other objects.

When photographing this office chair, I looked for a middle ground: I tried to imagine which lights could be useful for different positions of the chair (and also for other office furniture) and decided on the following lighting setup:

Vertically above the object I positioned an open P70 standard reflector (1). To the left and right of the chair I placed a Softbox 90x120 (2) and just below the front edge of the table a Softbox 30x120 (3). As a background I chose another large acrylic plate (4), which was backlit by a Softbox 120x180.

Depending on the position of the chair, I could now optimise the light very quickly via the power of the connected lamp (and without having to move them myself in a time-consuming way): For example, in the frontal shot, the P70 became the main light to emphasise the shaped backrest. This spotlight from above, however, was then practically superfluous in the rear view (it only emphasised the grooves in the plastic at the very top of the backrest) and the two softboxes at the side took over the role of the main light: by means of reflections, the shaping of the backrest was beautifully worked out. Especially for the side shot, the narrow softbox from below (3) was important to make the dark details of the controls appear bright enough. This softbox was additionally equipped with a textile honeycomb grid.

The photographs were taken with a digital medium format camera and a focal length of 80 mm. With a shutter speed of 1/125 s and aperture 11.0, the sensitivity was ISO 100.