I was commissioned for Ebay to shoot a flat lay - also known as knolling - to illustrate purchases made during lockdown which could then be resold, rather than gathering dust.
I had the camera on a boom about 12 feet in the air, tethered to my laptop and triggered remotely. Lighting was the primary concern here, as items in a flat lay fill the frame and need equal emphasis. I wasn’t thrilled with the reference image where strip lights had been placed around the edges. While everything had been lit identically and from from all sides, it looked very unnatural.
Soft lighting from directly above would achieve something fairly even across the frame, but risked being too boring and flat. And if it were too close to the camera it could diminish shadows to the point that objects appear “floaty”. Harder lighting wouldn’t help this, though, as reflections could become problematic, and generally, hard, direct lighting is horrible.
In the end we used one main light in a ~60° reflector, bounced into a corner of the studio, top right. As well as softening the light, it gave more light to subject distance, so less falloff. However, there was some falloff at the bottom left of the frame, so we used another light as a fill there.
The lighting now looked a touch ‘diagonal’, so a couple of poly boards filled in the darker edges at bottom right and top left. A bit messy overall, but it did the job.
Once set up, art director / production designer Aimee Meek www.meekandwild.com did the meticulous and main work (i.e. all of it) of arranging and rearranging the objects to fit the square. Flat lay items are usually grouped by colour, purpose, shape, size etc. but here the first concern was fitting them around the people, as well as near the person (i.e. age group) they refer to, whilst leaving space for text.
The final image (right) was then overlaid with prices people could expect to get for the items.
We also photographed the age groups and their things individually (above), as well as the top ten items on their own (below), where Aimee could be creative with layouts and composition.
We ended the shoot with a gif (below) - I’m still not sure if it’s pronounced ‘gif’ or ‘gif’ (or even ‘gif’ (unlikely!)). It was again magically overlaid with graphics by magical beings (and here it is on Facebook):