Beginner Product photography help, please

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Starling Inspector

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Richard
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Hello

I have just joined the forum, and I would like some advice on improving my product photography. This seems like a friendly and active forum.

I have a website, from which I sell wine. I shoot the bottles. I am no expert on photography; I use my camera for this sole purpose. My equipment is:

Canon 600D DSLR
Tripod
50mm fixed lens
shooting table
two soft boxes, one of which is used for uplighting
Affinity Photo on an iMac for editing

Could the forum please advise on how to make my images more professional without spending (too much) money on new equipment? I put the images on my website at 720 px high .PNG with compression, so we don't need ultra-professional shots. Is there something else I should be doing? I aim for around 35kb for each image. Any more than that, and the pages will start loading slower.

I have one of the soft boxes to the left of the shooting table. What tends to happen is that I can see the wrinkles from the cover of the soft boxes reflected on the left side of the bottles. I normally blur this out with a layer of median blur and drop the exposure a little. I try not to edit the images too much, as a) it absorbs a lot of time and b) the more I do, the more artificial the images look. I hold up a white plastic sheet to the right of the shooting table to get a bit of reflected light in. This has worked for me so far, but there's always room for improvement, right?

I have attached a few sample images if anyone has great ideas for improvement.

Many thanks in advance, Richard

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As above, what’s the illumination source in the ‘soft boxes’.

I suspect they’re the cheap fluorescent soft boxes, and the recommendation would be to upgrade to flash, but my first thought is lighting placement, and I’d start with a soft box at one side but further back than your current position for the red, and behind the white wine bottles, with fill for the label.

I can’t think of a good reason to light from underneath, for the darker bottles that’s doing nothing at all.
 
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Thanks both. You suspect right. These are fluorescent lights. I hadn’t thought of putting one behind. I’ll try that first. I’ll also try a little further away. Thanks.
 
Starling Inspector said:
Thanks both. You suspect right. These are fluorescent lights. I hadn’t thought of putting one behind. I’ll try that first. I’ll also try a little further away. Thanks.
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Our great friend @Garry Edwards has tutorials on dark field and bright field lighting that will be worth a read, maybe a specific bottle lighting too?

I’d also consider masking up some of the soft box to create more of a strip box shape.

I’m guessing you already have a white reflector, but you might also find a use for a black reflector, too.

As for the light sources, generally I’d recommend upgrading to flash, and decent strip lights, but you can probably manage almost as well with what you have, so a £300 plus spend is likely not vfm
 
Fluorescent isn't the best choice but it will do. Personally I would always use flash because it's easier, has a lot more power, making whatever ambient light (the light that happens to be present) either totally irrelevant or at least unimportant, but fluorescent will do.

Looking at your example photos, you've got the right approach but the softboxes aren't in the best place and also need to be further back, so that they basically just light the edges of the bottle, with a much smaller lit area than you have at the moment (first 3 pics) That will also show the label properly, which is important. The label may or may not then end up a bit dark, but this is very easily corrected in post processing.

And don't overexpose your shots, if the background needs to be pure white then this is another, and very simple, job for post-processing.

Please see Lighting Challenge 1 thread, Brightfield lighting
Please see Lighting Challenge 4 thread. Darkfield Lighting

Potentially useful videos

And another

View: https://youtu.be/LlYy8eTRLFc?si=1rT4IW0z0ExdQL22
 
Thanks Garry. Very helpful. I don't want to spend a great deal of cash on this, but I liked your tips in the video.
 
Starling Inspector said:
Thanks Garry. Very helpful. I don't want to spend a great deal of cash on this, but I liked your tips in the video.
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You don't need to spend a lot of cash, lighting is basically nothing more than an understanding of basic principles and very basic physics, and there's an argument that the more we have in terms of equipment, the more difficult the process becomes. The video on shooting the whisky bottle did require a more specialised tool, the honeycomb, but there's a simple workaround to the lack of a honeycomb - make one yourself. Most good pubs (and Weatherspoons :) ) have black drinking straws. Get a few, the longer you leave them the greater the honeycomb effect will be and you will definitely need to cut them down, but just cobble a few together with a rubber band or two, use a bit of tape to fit them to the end of a torch and you have a honeycomb:)

And simplicity is why I believe that the "Lighting Challenge" threads I linked to should be useful - the "rules" only allowed a single light source, with zero post-processing work, so they hopefully show the principles clearly.

Real-world, more than one light is often needed, which is where the videos have the potential to add to your knowledge.
 
There is a Youtube Channel that has several wine bottle and wine glass photo shoot tutorials that you might benefit from. Again, you don't need the fancy equipment and lighting that he uses. The channel is "Camera Club Live". Barbe Moorings has posted several hundred videos, and most they are table top still shoots. When you go to his channel, select the "Videos" tab, and it will list them all for you to select the ones related to wine and wine bottles. In each video he shows you step by step how he creates the final shot, where he positions the lights, what kind of lights, use of reflectors, etc. I have been able to recreate many of his shots using much more reasonably priced Godox lights, a few soft boxes, a cheap smoke machine, and one of my Canon cameras, usually using just a 24-70 lens, but a 50 mm will work well for most of these shots. You will just need to zoom with the tripod position.

My shooting table is actually just a 32" square table top with no legs that was found at a Flea Market years ago. It is a bit warped, so likely not fit for making the intended table. I just face the visible warp to the rear so it isn't seen. This table top is placed on top of a tall wooden stool to give it the needed legs, with a piece of foam drawer liner between them to keep the top from sliding around. Lately I have been adding a set of plastic bed risers under the legs of the stool so I don't need to bend over so far to operate the camera. I have collected about 2 dozen 54" square linen table cloths, each in a different color or design that I use, but then add items of my choice (props) to this for the shot. Distance behind the table and the inverse square law can be used to surround my table with black, but I have sometimes hung mat board from a C-Stand boom arm to achieve colored backgrounds for some shot, or just placed this table assembly close enough to one of my .

In my early years of photography I had tried some of this "Still Life" kind of photography, but with film my success rate was pretty low, so most of my work since then has not included it, until about 18 months ago when I decided to give it another try. This time, and with modern controllable lighting and a good digital camera it's been a game changer. I frequently do "Still Life" now when nothing else is scheduled for my studio. It keeps me busy and my creative juices flowing, so it's been well worth doing. I haven't done much with wine or glassware yet, but I will be doing some soon.

Charley
 
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