Pixiq

Hello, my pixiq reader! This is my first article here, and I really hope my articles about the photography I do will be inetersting for you. I am going to open a product studio photography world to you as I see it myself :-).
I'll be posting here most interesting shots we do in the studio: behind the scenes from a real assignments, tips and tutorials and tons of other cool stuff I am exploring every day.

Today I'll show you how we did our recent assignment: a bottle of vodka with martini glass  on a black background. This was a little unusual project: recently we shoot the same bottle with glass on white and gray gradient backgrounds, and lately I was teased by one of the readers of my blog who asked how would we shoot glass on a black backdrop.

So, we decided to give it a try and shoot similar composition on completely black background:-)

This is how I was imagining the final photo:

Crisp looking bottle with highlighted edges. Label is bright in center, brightness slowly dims to the edges, making edges of the label even with the black background. Martini glass filled with vodka, contoured with light, bright colorful olive on a red stick in it. The rest of the image is really colorless.

First, let me tell you more about specifics of shooting subjects made of glass.

Working with glass, the biggest difference from any other type of photography is that we can't directly highlight our subject, as we do with portraiture, etc: glass is clear and glossy. Meaning it will only refract and partially reflect the light, and that reflection light won't be diffused at all.

I need to keep this in mind when planning where to position the lights: usually glass look the best when light is behind it (we lit background), not the object itself.

So.. the tricky parts of our shoot are these: background is black, no way we can have lights on it. Only front and sides are left for the lights. Plus, we have a label on the bottle which suppose to be highlighted somehow, without a reflection on the glass (later about this).

Now the photo-shoot, step by step:

Step one. White diffuser panels on both sides.

We've used a black glossy Plexiglass sheet bended 90 degrees so it formed a shooting table. The very first iteration of the lighting was simple: 2 large diffuser panels on both sides of the Plexiglass panel and 2 stripboxes behind the diffuser panels to create nice gradient filling.

Below is the result, bottle alone:

Not too bad, right? But there are few things which I did not like at all: Bottle surface was looking mate, but the actual bottle is completely transparent glossy glass.
This is how diffuser panel works: highlighted by strip-boxes it created very smooth reflection. I quite often use this effect in product or jewelry shots, but it did not work well here.

Also, take a look below on how picture looked like when I've added a martini glass filled with water (first time it was water:-). Same time I've moved strip-boxes closer to the diffusers (to create sharper reflections), but it did not help much:

Glass with liquid added:

Martini glass made thing looks pretty bad, as it reflected both white diffusers. Not really what i was looking for.

Step two. Striboxes through gap in black screens on both sides:

So, in the second step I've start changing diffuser panels to a black (black product facing) screens, the light was coming from the gap between them . 
Below is the actual photo of how such setup looked like:

The second stripbox was on the right behind the diffuser, not visible here. Result was not acceptable at all, and I've replaced diffuser with two black screens, with 3-4'' gaps in between of them, filled with stripbox lights:

Because the table surface was dark and glossy, it worked like a mirror, reflecting the white ceiling above the table. This why one more black screen was placed on top of the table.

This setup worked really well, and I was able to easily control size of the light sources: it was necessary to adjust it differently on each side because the bottle was not positioned at a center of the scene. Light source from the right was making a larger reflection on a bottle's left (yes, left:-), and I'd have to move gap more to a front or change it width to make highlights on both sides of the bottle even: the idea was to create the same size of contour  lines on the bottle and glass.

The same lighting setup, side view:

This what such setup produced for us, when everything was positioned properly:

The glass itself looked exactly like we wanted, and the next step was to highlight the label on the bottle and olive in the martini glass. When we added one more soft-box in front of the subject (left to a camera), bottle got a full body reflection from it, see step 3 below.

Step 3. Highlighting the front elements:

Softbox on the front:

See these 2 vertical lines appeared on the bottle? One slim (left) one fat (right)? This is what one small strip box can do for the subject like our bottle. First line is a reflection from the outer surface of the bottle, second one is a magnified reflection from the inner surface.
Bottle looked like a zebra, far from what I had in mind.

What do we do to highlight subject with both types of surfaces: glossy finish and matte surface to avoid direct, non-diffused reflection on the glossy part of the subject? The only way I know (polarizer won't work here, if you were wondering) is to have the light source positioned at such angle that "hard" reflection from the glossy surface won't be visible at all (meaning reflected light won't reach the camera).
On other hand, matte surface (label in out case) will reflect diffused light, which means it will get back to a camera sensor, making label look brighter...

This is what I did to the lighting setup: large stripbox, positioned below the shooting table, so the reflection on the glass won't be visible from the camera. The label got enough light to become much brighter in the center, exactly how I wanted.

Front stripbox added to the light setup:

Below the outcome:
Empty glass and filled glass with exactly the same lighting, just to give you some ideas how much difference liquid can make for the whole composition:

No liquid in the glass:

Liquid (vodka) added:

As you see, the liquid added one more element to our composition, and definitely that was not the best addition (looking at ll these crazy reflections in it) for a photographer. However, the result was quite acceptable this time. 30 minutes of a post-production will fix the rest. The final result is below.

The final image, a slight touch-up was applied in Photoshop:

Update: The follow-up shot: an easy way to shoot glass on a black

Want to learn more about product photography? Check out my e-books and video tutorials:

Secrets of Studio Photography  e-books

Related articles:

* The follow-up shot: an easy way to shoot glass on a black
* Shooting glassware on white background: high-key in product photography
* How to shoot glass: setting the lighting for tabletop product photography
* Lighting the lights: Designer's tabletop lamp product photography tutorial

Alex Koloskov

P.S If you are really can't wait, you can find a lot of behind the shoot explanations like this one on my personal blog.