I am sure that you are all familiar with this by this product by now, if you want to call it that. It is of course the iPhone 4 and I would hardly call it a “product”, it is more of a technological beautiful achievement. So of course I pre ordered it on the first day, and actually received it a day early. As excited as I was to play with the new features the first thing I did was stick it in the white box and get some shots of it with the Pentax. Here is what I did…

If you are new here you may want to check out my article about product shots. I built a basic setup with a sheet of poster board and two shop lights. Well, now I have developed that idea into a full 3′ x 3′ x 2′ foam core white box for some good clean product shots. What I did is basically is buy 5 sheets of 3′ x 2′ foam core and build a rectangular box with them with an exacto knife, and white tape. Its a fun project trust me, and the shots that you can get with a white box look very professional. Anyways, back to the iPhone story.

I opened the iPhone, didn’t  even turn it on, just set up a photo shoot for it. The entire time just reveling in my “nerd-dom”.

My setup included two reflectors with “natural white” bulbs in them shining into my light box so that the light would just bounce all over the place. I actually used my Pentax K-7 with a 17-70mm Sigma macro hsm lens for this shoot mounted on a Slik Sprint Pro II tripod. Here is what I learned.

-Be aware of your depth of field - When very close you have to pick a focal point and stick to it. For example if you are taking a photograph of a flower you need to choose wether to focus on the petals or the stigma in the middle, where you focus changes the entire image.

-White balance - When using a white box, I have to do a custom set of my white balance. The built in or automatic functions don’t seem to understand my lighting conditions and often make things look blue or orange. Use a custom white balance.

-Tripod is a must – When this close to an object, wether it is a flower or a phone, if you move the camera your image is going to turn out blurry. Assure that you get a crisp image, and use a tripod.

-Experiment - Move lights around, test reflections, text angles, zoom in, zoom out, etc. Try things until you get your desired result. And as always

- Have fun with it – being creative is fun.

Here are some of the other iPhone 4 pics

Additionally, I have had no actual issues with this phone. It blows my old iPhone (3G) out of the water, and improves in every way. I can achieve a certain amount of signal interference if I wrap my hands around the outside in an unnatural way, but I have yet to experience a dropped call. I think the media loves a story in this case, and especially a story that scuffs Apple’s untarnished post 2001 record. I recommend this phone to anyone interested, and the camera / flash are great!

Related posts:

1. Basic product shots
2. How to take HDR photos with the Pentax K-x
3. Fashion Shoot Experience
4. Manual white balance on the K-x
5. K-x meet the AF-540FGZ