Beginner Simple Bright Lighting for Product Photos

[Esk247]

Can anyone suggest some simple and relatively cheap lighting for basic product photography?

We have a wholesale site, a photographer does all the lifestyle shots but we also want to have the flexibility to do some shots of new products quickly and cheaply, so they can go on the website as soon as they're in stock.

At the moment, we have 2 x soft box lights and different coloured sweeps but I'm finding the images are quite flat. The lights obviously illuminate the whole scene but we need something that is more directional and shines a bright light on one side of the product - they're square products, so it looks good with a dark shadow down one side to show off the 3D look on the website.

I've managed to do it with sunlight a little but, we just don't have that much light in our office. The soft boxes give us an overall light across everything but we need some sort of bright white light that can be held quite low to create a long shadow etc? A flash maybe? Or will that create a blown out effect?

Any advice for beginners?

 

[AndrewFlannigan]

Have you tried taking one of the lights out of its softbox?

 

[Snapsh0t]

I've done this but using flash as the main lighting as well as the fill. I have two or three flashes pointing at a fairly low white ceiling then another flash as low-level fill on a second channel, set three or four stops down. This is easy with the Godox system as it's all controlled from the on-camera transmitter. You can see I've used it on this shot from the shadow on the Portaloo door.