First decent product shoot
by ap on 11/03/2008
Was recently asked to shoot some wine bottles. Proved to be a good opportunity to finally build the ligthbox I kept postponing.
The tricky thing about shooting glass is the strict control you’ve got to have on reflections. You’ll know that just by trying it yourself.
So the basic setup (pictured above) I used is as follows:
* Simple cardboard box
* Colored A2 paper sheets (used white, black, orange and silver as backdrops, reflectors or diffusers)
* Canon 430EX flash
* Ebay trigger remote
* Cheap tripod to hold the flash
* Canon 40D
* 70-200mm f2.8 EF lens
* Sigma 17-70m 2.8-4.5 lens for closeups
* Manfrotto 190XPROB tripod with 486RC2 ball head
The biggest problem I faced was only having one flash. I wanted to get an even lightning as possible across the bottle and that wasn’t going to be easy with one light source.
The solution was reflecting part of the light. The flash was positioned to the right of the lightbox and shot trough the first paper sheet diffusing it. Part of that light was bounced by the other paper sheet on the opposite side. I think it worked pretty well.
Using the orange backdrop I had another slight problem. Some the light from the flash was spilling on the backdrop giving the label an orange color cast. Fixed it using a cardboard gobo on the flash. That’s what you see on the setup photo blocking the view on the 430EX.
The other lesson learned concerned the shape of the diffusers. Failing to shape them as rectangular sources of light can mess up your pretty reflections and shatter your dreams of making magazine worthy wine bottle photos… right…. The good thing is that in the process you learn something about reverse engineering your own light to see where and how it went wrong (like they encourage you to do @ “strobist”:http://www.strobist.blogspot.com/).
And a little photoshopping to the rescue.
“Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com/ proved itself useful once more when user “josh.r”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/10877051@N04/ noted that I could have used black reflectors on the sides to enhance the edges. Will do so next time.
All things considered I’m very happy with the results and so was the client.
tiagoafpereira@gmail.com
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