Sometimes you have to get creative when trying to be creative. That is to say, you have to look to the unlikely sometimes to find the right prop or surface or background for your image.

Such was the case when shooting this image for Puma.

The background for this shot is the concrete floor in the studio, and the platform for these shoes were our wardrobe racks. The colors worked and we had three available to make this sort of industrial looking runner.

Wardrobe racks providing the platform for these shoes

Product stylist Ashley puts the finishing touch on this set up

The lighting set up for this shot ended up being a single light. Initially I felt like this would be a two light set up, with a small softbox aimed at the floor to the rear of the subject to keep the light from falling off and looking like an abyss, but that ended up being way too hard to manage. All we needed back there were a few reflecting boards to bounce light from my beauty dish back into the scene. Voila! A really nice one light shot.

As some readers of this blog may know, I am a full time staff photographer in a product studio for Nordstrom. I work with several other very talented photographers and stylists who all love their jobs. We decided collectively to start a bi-weekly photo challenge, we could be creative and share with each other some work outside of product photography. Every two weeks we will identify a theme, shoot an image or series of images, and then get together and share our images and process.

Our first round theme was "Street Photography" which we defined as a natural candid moment, shot without posing or any interference from the photographer. Here are the submissions:

Karen Utley - www.karenutley.com