# Advanced Lighting: 3 Ways to Level Up Your Product Photography - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/advanced-lighting-3-ways-to-level-up-your-product-photography/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Photography · Quick win · Rated 7 /10 # Advanced Lighting: 3 Ways to Level Up Your Product Photography By Gareth B. Davies · Updated July 2026 Tabitha Park · Product & Food Photographer Intermediate · 27 min Three punchy lighting tricks in under half an hour, but only if you already know your way around a strobe. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fadvanced-lighting-3-ways-to-level-up-your-product-photography%2F1634878013) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. Tabitha Park's class is built around a simple premise: once a photographer has the basics of diffused, even lighting down, the fastest way to make work stand out is to break that evenness on purpose. The course delivers on that premise across three tightly scoped demonstrations, each shot in real time on an actual product scene rather than explained in the abstract. The first segment tackles highlights, using a wine and chocolate still life to show how a large diffused source, in this case a light dome mounted to a continuous LED panel, throws a broad, clean highlight across a curved glass bottle. The specifics are what make this section work. Park tips the bottle toward the light to merge two broken highlight patches into one continuous streak, sprinkles salt under the base so the glass grips the surface and stops rolling once it's angled just right, and uses a paper bag on a clamp as an improvised flag to cut overexposure on a stray piece of white candy wrapper. These are the kind of small, specific fixes that separate a course with real studio experience behind it from one that just describes lighting theory. The second segment shifts to hard, undiffused light, first demonstrated by shooting through a glass teacup to paint a colored shadow onto the backdrop, then applied to a whiskey sour cocktail scene where sprigs of grain are clamped into the frame to cast sharp decorative shadows behind the bottle. The throughline here is genuinely useful: shadow sharpness is a function of how small and bright the source appears relative to the subject, so pulling the light progressively farther back, a foot at a time, sharpens the shadow edges the same way a smaller sun would. Watching that adjustment happen in real increments, with visible before-and-after results, makes the concept stick in a way that a still image alone would not. The third and shortest segment is the strongest structurally, because it reuses one setup to produce two opposite results. The same tabletop scene with dark bottles on a white background gets shot bright and airy with the light close and a fill card bouncing in, then reshot dark and moody by pulling the same light back three feet, dropping the fill entirely, and adding a flag to control a hot corner. It is a clear demonstration that mood is a function of light placement and contrast control rather than a wholly different setup, and it is the section most likely to change how a viewer approaches their own gear afterward. ## Where it falls short At 27 minutes across five lessons, the course moves fast and assumes a viewer who already understands aperture, ISO, and basic modifier behavior. There is no primer on equipment, no discussion of budget alternatives to a light dome and continuous LED panel, and exposure adjustments are narrated quickly rather than explained from first principles. Viewers without existing studio experience will likely follow the visual results without fully grasping why each adjustment works. The course also stays entirely within tabletop food and beverage subjects, so anyone shooting larger products, apparel, or subjects that cannot be rearranged by hand will need to extrapolate the underlying principles rather than copy the setups directly. Given the short runtime, the class is best treated as a focused technique refresher rather than a comprehensive lighting education, but within that narrow scope it delivers concrete, demonstrable value. The standout The one-light, two-looks demonstration, where a single light dome is scooted back three feet and stripped of its fill card to turn the exact same tabletop scene from bright and airy into dark and moody. ## What you will learn - · How to identify and shape a large diffused highlight on curved and flat surfaces using a light dome or window light - · How to use household tricks like salt and paper flags to control object placement and stray reflections - · How to shoot with bare, undiffused hard light to throw graphic shadows through a glass subject - · How to move a single hard light source progressively farther from a scene to sharpen shadow edges - · How to convert one lighting setup from bright-and-airy high-key to dark-and-moody low-key by repositioning one light and removing fill - · How to adjust aperture and ISO on the fly to compensate for exposure changes when moving lights Best for: Intermediate to advanced product or food photographers who already have studio lighting gear and want a handful of specific setups to break out of a formulaic, evenly-lit look. Skip it if: Beginners who don't yet understand basic three-point lighting, aperture, or ISO, since the class assumes that fluency and moves through setups quickly without covering fundamentals. Clarity of Instruction Engaging Teacher Helpful Examples Audio & Video Quality [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fadvanced-lighting-3-ways-to-level-up-your-product-photography%2F1634878013)