Making black plastic look good

How to photograph geosynthetics

For all of the scientific benefits surrounding geosynthetic plastic it is still black plastic, which as you can imagine, makes it very difficult to photograph. I am going to tell you about the work that I did for GSE to produce their new sales brochure. This work included product photography, production photography and ideas photography or to describe this another way it is photographing unique selling points.

GSE produce three different types of geosynthetic plastic: smooth geomembrane, textured geomembrane and geo net. I will begin by telling you about the easiest product to photograph, textured geomembrane. Although this is one piece of plastic it has two different surfaces which reflect light to varying degrees. The splattered plastic that produces the textured surface reflects more light than the smooth underlying sheet. This means that you can shine an even light across the sheet and the resulting image looks like a black and white Jackson Pollock. To describe this another way, the picture is subtle but accurate product picture of textured geomembrane.

Smooth geomembrane is much more difficult to photograph because you can not put any texture or depth into a smooth surface. This means that any accurate product picture of smooth geomembrane will have to be achieved with a creative use of lighting. I used a snoot (an attachment that narrows the spread of a flash light) to shine a beam of light across the smooth geomembrane and varying the angle of the light changed its spread. The resulting picture is an accurate product picture of smooth geomembrane that has movement and direction which makes it dynamic.

The photographic dilmemmas surrounding geomembrane do not exist with geo net because it is not a solid surface. This means that it is very easy to clearly show the product. However with everything creative to merely show something is very simple but to produce a creative product picture of geo net is much harder. Unlike the gemembrane pictures which were taken in the studio the geo net pictures were taken in the factory. Showing the product in situ brings the manufactured reality to the pictures.

If you photograph the geo net coming onto a silver chill roll stack the light will reflect off the chill roll stack clearly showing the black geo net. If you shine one light above the net then you will get a shadow in the chill roll stack but the remarkable thing is that the shadow is a red orange colour and not the black that you would expect it to be. This gives some colour to an otherwise very black and white image.

Another way to photograph the geo net coming onto the chill roll stack is to fill only half of the frame with the chill roll stack. This results in a very striking picture with one half black and the other white. On the white side of the frame you will clearly see the black geo net product. On the black side of the frame you will only see glimmers of the geo net where the net is reflecting the light. The resulting picture has a very immediate appeal because of the obvious black and white divide. It also very clearly shows the product but it also has a subtlety that you only see upon closer inspection.

In addition to product photography this job involved photographing GSE’s unique selling points. This process began with a general conversation about the fact that GSE are the only international producers of geosynthetics. This was distilled down to the phrase unique global coverage. So how do you photograph something global. Partly because of the word I initially thought of a globe so started thinking about photographing something spherical. As I developed this idea further I thought of photographing something round. Sheet geomembrane comes on a roll and so to bring the picture back to their product I shot the end of a roll of plastic. To indicate that this round product represents the world I wanted to show the sun rising above the horizon. This was very difficult as you have to shine a light directly into the camera. To make the light refract and spread to look like the sun rising as opposed to a single beam of light also caused a lot of problems. The resulting picture showed their product with the rising sun but it does not clearly say global coverage. To make it clear that the roll of plastic represents the world I dropped a map of Europe over it. So why you may ask did I drop a map of Europe over the roll of plastic and not a map of the world. The reason is that this image and the resulting brochure will only be used by their European offices.

I hope that I have made it clear how it is possible to photograph something as challenging as black plastic. This product does not naturally lend itself to photography which is a blessing in disguise because it forces you to think creatively about the best way to show the product. Similarly photographing unique selling points will always be about the communication of ideas with images.