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?
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.
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!
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?
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!
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.
I started to work on a metal can of cold beer earlier today to see what I could do. It’s not a subject I had photographed in the past, but was asked recently to show some of my beer shots.
Here is the result of a few hours of playing earlier today – everything but the table reflection was done in camera. No compositing.
The can still needs work – silver above and below the main red label – but the general lighting is starting to work. Next step is to tweak it and then add some interest. Maybe a lump of ice built up in front of the can? A pour into a glass behind the can? Not sure yet.
I’ll keep working with it to see what comes up.
Here is a nice clean shot of a Jackson-Triggs champagne bottle with flute.
It’s that time again – on October 15th, 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?
I’ve been working on a lot of shoots with glass lately. Glass is particularly difficult to shoot, especially curved glass surfaces like that of a bottle. It acts as a mirror, seeing everything around it, so it becomes an exercise in controlling light in every detail.
Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how I shot this bottle of Hennessy Cognac with a glass. This diagram shows an overhead view of the lighting setup – the Hennessy bottle is the circle with the star on it.
I used two light sources mounted behind a very large sheet of white plexi, sand-blasted on the side facing the set. The bottle of Hennessy was sitting on a large piece of oak. I wanted to completely back-light the bottle so the liquid would tend to glow and I wouldn’t show any reflections on the front of the bottle. I knew I was going to use a series of shots to create the final composited image.
The black gobos are used to cut the light coming from the large sheet of plexi – that allowed me to control exactly where the light was going to fall. The gobo behind the set in the frame of the shot was a section of black velvet – it’s still the best at absorbing light.
So, here’s the first shot of the set – for the bottle details, the glass behind it, and the lighting along the left edge of the bottle.
The gobos make sure the thin strip of light down the left side of the bottle doesn’t migrate too far forward. If the left gobo were removed, you’d get a large, wide white strip down the left side of the bottle – resulting from the reflection of the white plexi behind the set.
The gobo to the right of the bottle cuts any light that may be reflecting around the room. Since it’s glass, it’ll see any light in the room that is strong enough. The gobo kills any of that ambient light.
Finally, the gobo beside the camera is cutting the light from hitting the lens. It is blocking the light from the plexi sheet coming from the strobe to the left, and it is also cutting the light from the strobe behind the plexi to the right. If that gobo were not there, I’d get lens flare.
Next step is to light the labels.
That is done in two separate shots – one to light the main labels on the front of the bottle, and a second shot to light the cap.
To do that, I used a sheet of silver florentine and bounced the light back onto the front of the label. Silver florentine is just like a shiny piece of thin cardboard – great for reflecting light.
You have to be patient with positioning the card – you want the light to bounce from above and down, so you don’t get shiny reflections on the label. You also want to make sure the light is bouncing along the labels in the same location, otherwise it would look like the labels were each shot separately.
In the last shot, I placed a large sheet of silver florentine behind the bottle and positioned it so it would reflect the light from the white plexi toward the camera.
This shot will be used to illuminate the liquid in the final composite.
It’s important to fill the entire width of the bottle with light so all the liquid is lit up, being careful not to leave black gaps along either side of the bottle.
It’s also important to make sure the silver florentine card isn’t moved too far forward on the right side of the bottle, otherwise it will reflect on the front of the bottle and ruin the overall shot.
Remember not to adjust any of the settings on the camera – you don’t want to alter the aperture, otherwise it will make compositing the shots later virtually impossible. Keep everything the same from shot to shot, and be careful not to move the bottle.
Once all the pieces are shot and ready, you then composite them together to create one final shot. Here is the result.
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