Tips for lighting glass bottles?

TimSandhu

TimSandhu

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Does anyone have some tips on how I can improve my lighting on these glass bottles please? It's not for anything in particular, more of a learning exercise and it might be useful to one or two others.

I wasn't overly displeased with the results, but I wasn't sure if the edges of the highlights were a bit hard edged on the darker glass?


1.
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One thing that I couldn't quite get right here was the strip of shadow in the left hand bottle's highlight, just above the label. This was caused by the flash itself creating some sort of gobo. Not too difficult a fix in post, but I was trying to get most of it right in camera. To get around this, I switched the bottles around as seen in image 2.

2.
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I probably could have done a bit more post to maybe burn down the highlights, but since it was just an exercise, I left it as was.

3.
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This 3rd one I liked more, but I had to try something different with that one because the square shape of the bottle did not lend itself well to the same method of lighting 1 & 2. One flash was in the v-shaped foamcard thing to the left and the other directly behind the bottle as seen in image 4.

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And FWIW, this last one shows my somewhat crude "mini-studio" which is actually just a clothes horse thingy with some white foamcard bits, some tracing paper (for diffusion) and 2 SB600 flashes.

Any advice and comments welcome.

PS - mods, since this was more of a request for feedback to improve lighting technique (as opposed to critique), I hope it's ok to post this here.

Cheers.
 
What about shooting through paper? It seems like you have Card|Flash|Tracing Paper sandwich but the flash is showing through the tracing paper.

So, flash sat on the edge of your studio, zoomed to give a nice coverage on a sheet of A4 copier paper should work just as well as your current setup, but get rid of that shadow.
 
You've made a good start with a bad subject.
It's a bad - or difficult - subject because glass bottles come in all sorts of shapes and there is no single way of lighting all of them well,

You've done well to identify the major problem, getting an even specular highlight (a reflection of the light source) from top to bottom, but you're right when you say that it's too bright. It's too bright because it's too small, what you need to go for here (in most shots) is a LARGE, DIFFUSED SPECULAR HIGHLIGHT and you can only do that with a large light source, very, very close to the subject. The normal tool of choice for this is a strip softbox (which a single hotshoe flashgun won't work well in). As you're managing without studio lighting and strip softboxes you'll have to construct large rectangular boxes, painted white inside, bounce your hotshoe flashes into them and hope that it works. It will, up to a point, but I doubt whether it will be easy both to make them work well and to position them as close as they need to be.

There is of course a lot more to it than that, for example we often use focussing spotlights (described in this thread) to highlight labels or provide backlight coming through the bottle to add sparkle, we often underlight bottles too, but it's a starting point.

All is explained in detail in my still life tutorial and video.
 
As Garry said, and pick up a copy of 'light science and magic' - it's pretty much the textbook on lighting.
 
HI Tim,

take a look at the videos on Prophotolife.com. There is one on lighting glass which I hope will be of use.

Cheers
 
Thanks to all who replied with helpful hints/links and suggestions. And a huge thanks to Garry for the very detailed response. Gives me something to think about and work on :thumbs:
 
You're welcome Tim.

I meant to mention, but forgot, that you found the square bottle easier simply because it's square - round bottles need much bigger softboxes because of their convex shape.
 
TimSandhu said:
Good link Adam. He's got some striking results with surprisingly low costs. And best of all, he shares the setups in detail.
Click to expand...

Cheers Tim I find it amazing what you can do with a couple of empty tubes of pringles. I have been meaning to buy some for a while now and have a play.
 
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