Photography

A picture can say more than a thousand words. The right image can be an invaluable sales tool. On the other hand, a badly chosen or badly made photo can make you loose a potential customer in seconds. A professional service or high-quality product can only be presented well with professional, high quality pictures. All details have to come out just right: lighting, composition, perspective, foreground and background, color balance, contrast, focus, depth-of-field... Any of these may ruin the photo.

Silver Wolf Media's experience with product and report photography ensures the proper image in every situation. In most cases, a snapshot taken with a consumer-grade digital camera just won't do. Below are a few examples of the photography that we have done for clients over the years.

A few examples of our work

The following photos are copyrighted by Silver Wolf Media and Frank van Wensveen, and may not be used for any purpose without permission. The images below are clickable; a larger version will appear in a separate browser window.

This photo was shot on consumer-grade 35mm film, and scanned with a professional slide scanner. It was made as an illustration for a catalogue, reproducing an art concept made a few years earlier.

This vintage port crane was shot on 35mm Fuji Velvia, scanned with a professional slide scanner, and converted into black and white for maximum effect. It was used for a web editorial. Industrial architecture can offer many opportunities for dramatic lighting and perspective.

This staircase of a subway station near Rotterdam is another example of architectural photography. Shot late at night with a digital SLR camara, it was converted into black and white (using channel mixing rather than desaturation) to emphasize the shape and depth of the structure.

This image was made for an online product catalogue. Rather than just take a picture of a loudspeaker (which would have been rather dull) a side perspective was used, and the subject was lit and framed so as to make it a bit more playful and interesting.

This roof-mounted DVD display was interesting to shoot. Designed to be mounted against the roof of your car, it is difficult to show in its proper perspective. Although we generally try to keep digital post-processing to a minimum, in this case some tweaking was required to achieve the proper end result.

A lot of things can go wrong when you shoot glossy objects. Lighting can be challenging because the reflections can easily lead to "burned-out" highlights, and care has to be taken not to show parts of the studio set-up in the reflective surfaces. In this case, the high contrast between the glossy surface and the matte black front made proper lighting even more important.

This photo was made to be used as an illustration for a web page. Had the item been photographed for a product catalogue, simply depicting the article against a neutral background would have been sufficient. As part of the look-and-feel of a web page however the photo needs a bit more, which has been achieved by putting it upright on a reflective background, and framing the image so that it included the reflection.

This is an example of a product catalogue photo. There's no need to get creative here, but the item has to be shown clearly and accurately, in the correct colors and with all relevant details clearly visible. This photo was compressed into a smaller file for use on a website. The result shows some compression artefacts, mostly visible on the front panel of the unit. This illustrates why image files taken from websites often cannot be used for other purposes.

This close-up was taken for an electronics repair manual. Care had to be taken to avoid problems with perspective, focus and lighting, which are much more visible in close-up photos.

A deceptively simple photo, shot for a supermarket advert. The supermarket had a ceiling that was painted green, and was lit with fluorescent tubes. Getting accurate colors in such a situation is nearly impossible, and all photos came out in shades of green and yellow. During the photo shoot, several shots of color reference charts were made, and these were used during the digital post processing stage for color correction. It was not possible to achieve a 100% perfect "daylight" color balance, but given the on-site lighting conditions the end result is not too bad.

This panorama was shot in a VIP bus used for promotion tours by a computer company. Windows, spotlights and many reflective surfaces posed a serious lighting challenge. The photo was shot in several sections, which were then digitally composited into the panorama shown here. Because the bus was rather narrow and deep, a single wide-angle shot did not give the desired effect, and the extremely short focal distance needed to show the entire interior of the bus caused serious perspective problems and lens distortion. Compositing gave a much better result.

This photo was shot on the eve of a trade show, as part of a service catalogue for an exhibition construction company.

This image was part of a photo report shoot for a computer magazine, and was taken during a computer convention.

This photo was made for a company brochure. It was shot during a trade show, in uneven lighting conditions. Special care had to be taken to achieve an accurate color balance. The slight color noise visible in the gray paint on the equipment cabinet to the left could have been removed during post processing, but was left in.