Product Shot of Adidas Messi 16.3 Soccer Shoes

I’m always looking for ways to combine my hobbies with photography.  I grew up playing soccer and continued to through my high school years while also playing a bit in college.  After those oh so distant college years though, I stopped playing.  Now that I’m in my early thirties, I decided it was time for be more active again.  Since I hate exercise and never stick with it, I figured I would do something that I enjoy.  I found a local advanced pick-up soccer league and joined it immediately.

Having not played for a while, I needed some new soccer shoes.  After finding the pair I liked, I couldn’t wait to try them out.  That’s when the idea came into my head.  I don’t really do much product or still-life photography.  The most I’ve done was photographing military gear for an editorial assignment.  It was a lot of fun, and I saw these new shoes as an opportunity to give it another try.

The day before breaking the new shoes in, I set up my gear in my home office.  I wanted to do something fun with the shot.  I decided to suspend the shoe with fishing line.  The trickiest part of this was actually getting the shoe lace to hang right.  Each side of the shoe lace had multiple strands of fishing line suspending them to give the curved and more natural look.

The real fun part about this shot was creating the light trails.  With a shutter of 3 seconds, I would waive a multi-bulb LED strip light behind the shoe to create the streak of light.  It took me over 30 tries to finally get the look I was wanting.  Each attempt taught me more about the movement, direction, and placement that I needed for the strip light.

As for the setup, I used my three Paul C. Buff Einsteins.  One directly over-head with a gridded 22-inch beauty dish.  The other two lights w/ grids were on each side of the frame.  Lastly, I used a large piece of foam core board to bounce some light onto the bottom of the shoe.