Photographing this beer was our last shot of the day, and by far the most complex.
As the day progressed, I did less and less and ‘asked’ my victims to do more and more, partly out of pure laziness and partly because I feel that most people learn more from doing than from watching. By the time we got to this shot, I was in full lazy mode and did virtually nothing except make sarcastic comments about wedding photographers…
It took a while to sort through the images. After deleting all those that were out of focus we were left with 73 shots, many of which seemed to be identical to each other, so I’m guessing that there may have been some wedding photographers in the group after all J
About the only thing I did do was to arrange the very preliminary lighting. I used a strip softbox to bottle right, we tend to use strip softboxes a lot, but photographing bottles is what they’re actually designed to do, because the long thin strip of light can create a perfectly even diffused specular highlight right along the length of the bottle.
We used a table, covered by a black background, as the product base. My fault, we should have used a pillar of some kind instead because the table was too wide for the job. Because it was too wide we couldn’t use another strip softbox to camera left, so we used a 70 x 140 softbox instead, the extra distance compensated for the extra width. But if it hadn’t, we could have used cinefoil to mask the width down.
The shot below shows the setup The faults here are with the softbox being out of square and the light too powerful (later shots were with the strip softbox turned down at least a stop, much better) but this shots shows the approach.
The law of unintended consequences kicks in here. We didn't light the metalwork that holds the cap in place because it ended up being lit pretty effectively by those softboxes, it always does because the light from the softboxes is the right shape and is coming from the right place.
See how dark the label is though on the bottle? The label is absolutely vital on a product shot.
This is where I interfered a bit. There are a couple of ways of illuminating just the label, which absolutely had to be done. My own method is to use a pretty specialised focussing spotlight, a brilliant and versatile tool that can create and throw pretty well any required shape of light, but it isn’t the sort of thing that is lying around in the typical home studio, so the group rightly opted for a Garry bodge, which involves more work but does the job. It could have been done better with more time, but the idea here was really to show the principles involved, and the various methods that can be used to overcome challenges.
The bodge here was a piece of Cinefoil (trade mark of Rosco) and it is also known by the generic name of Blackwrap. Cinefoil comes in a roll that lasts ages, and is thick aluminium ‘baking foil’ coated black both sides – we use it all the time in the studio, often for making flags and black absorbers. Strangely though, Cinefoil isn't popular with studio photographers - maybe it's too cheap, maybe it doesn't look pretty enough, maybe Rosco need to sell it for thousands and print a big red '
L' on it to make it appealing... In other words, if you haven't got any, get some. On the day though, we just cut out a small rectangle and shone a flash through it so that only the label was lit by that light. Place the Cinefoil really close to the subject and place the flash head really far away, and you get pretty sharply focussed edges, reverse that and you get very blurred edges. The shot below shows the effect it produced, which I think is pretty cool.
The softbox lighting the left hand side isn't creating its diffused specular highlight over the entire height of the glass, that's because of the complex convex shape of the glass. Not to worry, once the glass is filled with beer that won't show.
Next up, the beer was added. This has to be done last because otherwise it would go flat.
And
almost finally, Phil wanted to add just a wisp of smoke from the smoke machine…
Personally I blow tobacco smoke through a straw to achieve this, but the smoke machine could work
with a very gentle touch… or with some PP work.
There is absolutely no PP work on these shots, it is very definitely needed, to sort out unwanted colour in the glass, unwanted dust everywhere, refracted light coming out of the glass, odd unwanted specular reflections on the bottle, most of the smoke needs to go and of course the background needs work too, but it's pointless doing PP work on a shot that is supposed to show how something was done.
And finally, the beer was disposed of, I’m told that it tasted good.
Sarcasm about the number of 'wedding photographer' shots aside, I think they did pretty well with this shot. My usual comment of “My cat could have done a better job and I haven’t even got a cat” doesn’t apply here.
