What about commercial photography?

Once upon a time, when you were thinking about photography, you were most probably thinking about snapshots taken at birthdays parties or during a summer trip with your family. Usually it was one of your parents taking out his/her reflex camera and loading it with a film roll. After a week or so you would have seen the results on prints or slides, knowing that in a way or another those pictures were building up your stock of memories.
In some cases, photography was linked to the class picture taken at school, or maybe the Xmas greetings card to send to relatives and family friends. But in that case a pro would have stepped in with his big expensive gear.

Nowadays even the most basic mobile phone has an embedded digital camera that would let you take pictures and share them with the whole world in a matter of few seconds. At the same time the pros are still claiming that their work is a kind of art, that the gear they're using is not relevant but it just due to their talent that they can deliver such a high-end product.

You already know what I think about gear, and the huge difference I find in between a snapshot taken with the rear camera of your smart-phone or with a decent DSLR (ok, mirror-less, micro 4/3 or whatever other kind of real camera included). If those pro photographers were so good at taking astonishing pictures with any camera they would be given, I still wonder why camera producers still sell items that are priced well above what any normal person could afford... and why commercial photographers don't use entry level DSLR for their work.

There are several kinds of photography: nature, wildlife, portraiture, commercial, street-photography... you name it!

But with all this in mind, and due to the fact that I just bought a new pair of basketball shoes, I wanted to try out how my little D3200 would have performed at taking some kind of commercial shot.

I do not own or have access to a photo studio. I don't have flash lights, strobes or any kind of lighting system. I didn't even bother to come up with a homogeneous backdrop on which to place my shoes.
So what I did was to put my shoes on the kitchen floor, turn on some lights in the apartment and try out some settings for the best exposure I could come up with. As you can imagine the result wasn't even close to a commercial shot, so I then processed the RAW file and retouched a bit the background in order to clean it up.
The result? Here it is

I uploaded it at full resolution, with all the 24Mpixel the D3200 sensor can deliver. Looking close at it, there is still a bit of yellowish glowing on the left, maybe I should have worked that out a bit more... At the same time the level of details is decent, but way off anything that could be commercially used.
What's the final comment on all this?
Well, with photoshop you can really make a mediocre product shot look decent, but still it's nothing comparable with a high-end shot taken with professional gear in a studio......


Just for fun I also took a close up of the Air Jordan logo that was on the shoebox

Here you can really see the resolution limitation and the chromatic aberration coming up at the border between the black and white, even though I really tried to fix it in post-production.

So, what do you think?
Are all those pro photographers  honest when they say that it's not about the gear but just about the photographer? And just by coincidence they could train you to achieve results similar to their........