I continue to work on lighting techniques with bottles – always new things to try.
Jan 18
We also worked on our white wine lighting setups – always more complex cause the liquid allows you to see through to the background, which is never flattering. White wine always needs a bit of pop to make it look good too!
For our testing, we used a Riesling, which always tends to look like Sprite when shot if you’re not careful.
Jan 14
My assistant Breanne and I were experimenting with different setups for shooting wine bottles on a set earlier this week. We wanted to get great looking shots without having to do a lot of compositing and retouching work in Photoshop.
This is one of the shots from our work – we only needed two photos for this image. The main shot, plus a second shot to get the gold lettering on the caps to come to life. Only a few touch ups in post.
As with most of my work, I try to capture as much in-camera as possible, relying on post processing for minor tweaks and clean ups.
Jan 11
The 2010 portfolio book is now ready for shipping. Contact me and I’ll get a copy of the book out to you via FedEx right away.
I’ve included a preview of the book here…
For this year’s book we’ve gone with an all-white linen design, double-sided matte papers in a self-shipping case. We’ll even arrange to have the book picked up when you’re done with it.
Jan 04
It’s that time again – on January 7th, my next promo will be going out via e-mail. Response to the champagne flutes was so positive after the American Thanksgiving, that I chose it for this month’s promo.
If you’d like to get on my distribution list, please contact me. You won’t get bombarded with promos, and we definitely won’t sell or giveaway your info. And what could be nicer than getting beautiful photos of yummy food in your e-mail once every 6 weeks?
Jan 02
Sorry for the long hiatus – can’t believe December completely slipped away. We did some shooting for a new client in December – Nokia – which kept us busy. Looking forward to shooting more projects for them this year.
As we wrap up the holidays, I thought I’d try and squeeze in one more fancy meal – a delicious egg dessert with fruit and a latté – delicious.
As with most of my shots involving food, this was shot using natural light – a long stretch of windows along the left side of the setup. The biggest problem when shooting something like this is to control the highlights on the shiny edge of the egg dessert facing the windows. Here is how the dessert looked before editing.
See how shiny and bright the left side of the egg is looking – not good. It’s gone specular – meaning it’s basically white with no details. There are a number of ways to solve this problem, but the simplest is to take another shot, but under-expose it enough to retain detail on the left side of the egg, like this.
Of course, this shot is too dark to use – the food looks dull and tired. We load the original shot above and this shot into Photoshop, and use the under-exposed shot to “paint in” the shiny parts of the egg with this under-exposed shot. We just paint over the shiny areas until we get a well-exposed egg, removing the blown out white areas.
The result – the first shot above. Scroll up and you’ll see how well this works to control over-exposures on shiny surfaces.
Nov 21
With the American holiday weekend fast approaching, it’s time to celebrate with a glass (or three) of champagne!
This is one of the few types of shots I do using entirely strobe lighting. To get the right lighting on the glasses and of a short enough duration to freeze the bubbles, the shot demands strobes. Whereas my typical natural light shots are 3 seconds or more in duration, this one was shot at 1/10th of a second, using an aperture of f/10.
One of the most deceptive things about this shot is the lights on the strings and the apparent size of the individual bulbs. The initial thinking is to use a longer exposure to make the bulbs larger, but in fact, it is determined by the aperture setting of the camera. Since I used a very long lens for this shot (210mm on medium format) and was relatively close to the set, I wasn’t worried about changing the aperture and the effect that would have on the depth of field in the shot – it was going to be shallow regardless.
Here is a diagram showing my lighting setup:
The key is to use a large light source – in this case, a very large white diffusion panel. That provides the nice lighting on the flutes – a small light source would not provide the beautiful strip of light down each side of the glasses.
It’s also important to keep the light off the string of lights – if you light them, you’ll light the string between the lights, and that’s not desirable. Seeing a bit of the string is fine, but lighting the string would look odd.
Finally, the backdrop is lit separately to show the colour of the red wreaths.
The rest is just placement of the props on the set to give a nice overall balance. The most demanding part – surprisingly, it was the metal wine bucket with the knobby handles. Getting it just right took some work.
The final image is a composite of two shots – the one exposed as seen above, and a second under-exposed, to deal with the bright speculars in the flutes that resulted from the lighting setup. The under-exposed shot is composited into this shot to “paint over” the specular areas of the glasses, bringing them back from white.
Hope you enjoyed the post – have a happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Nov 16
It’s that time again – on November 20th, my next promo will be going out via e-mail.
If you’d like to get on my distribution list, please contact me. You won’t get bombarded with promos, and we definitely won’t sell or giveaway your info. And what could be nicer than getting beautiful photos of yummy food in your e-mail once every 6 weeks?
Nov 10
I seem to be on a real beer kick lately. My last post, which was a long time ago now (apologies), I showed my progress shooting a can of beer. I finally found some time to shoot a bottle.
Although similar to a can of beer, bottles have their own challenges – primarily, you can see the liquid in the bottle, and it needs to look great!
So, a few days of work, numerous different approaches to see what I thought would work best, and this is what I came up with.
The setup was surprisingly simple – one soft box as the primary light, and one light shone up through the bottom to kick the liquid and give it some nice pop. The biggest challenge with the bottom light is controlling the light, not letting it spill onto the back or front of the product, and having enough power to shine up into the liquid.
The rest is just careful placement of the soft-box relative to the bottle, rear reflection, and gobos to control the light. And of course, the sweat on the bottle to give you the impression it is cold and ready to drink.
If you have questions – don’t hesitate to ask. Hope you enjoyed this post!
Oct 20
It’s amazing what you can learn in a day. The first shot of the beer can I posted yesterday was a little flat – the lighting was dull. It didn’t give the can any life.
So I worked on the lighting, re-thought my approach, and went with a setup that created dramatic light on the can. Nice and bright down the middle, fading off nicely to near black along both edges.
I also addressed the sweat on the can – the first shot was sweaty, but the beads were too small. In this shot, I used a different technique and allowed the sweat to bead up nicely.
The shot is all accomplished in-camera – there is no Photoshop retouching done to this can. All that was done in Photoshop was to remove the support.
I think this version is starting to look a lot more appealing. It needs more time to tweak the placement of the sweat beads, but that’ll have to wait for another day.
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