Photographing Bottles

Photographing Bottles

Sometimes when tutoring you get asked about a specific thing a bit more unusual than normal. This happened today.

Whilst doing a Lightroom session we were discussing past studio work that I had helped out with and the current products that were being photographed were bottles. To be precise, bottles of wine for a large supermarket chain!

I had photographed bottle products before but couldn’t quite remember my setup, so a quick bit of research and also adjusting for the fact that we weren’t in a studio, we set up the light and made some minor adjustments to how it could work and took some shots. They came out well and we wound up the session and I headed home.

I wanted to give it ago in my studio when I got home, so I setup 3 lights. 1 large octagon light as the back light and 2 rectangular soft boxes, one on each side.

I took 6 photos and selected the last couple to show. From starting to set up the lights to final photo was no longer than 20mins and this photos are straight out the camera with just a crop and minor highlight tweak in Lightroom. They are not cutout so the small block at the bottom is a toy brick and is what the bottle was perched on! If this was a ‘proper’ shoot, I would have edited out the wooden block!

The first photo is with both sidelight vertically positioned, creating 2 lines down the bottle.

The next image is with the right light rotated through 90 degrees, this makes a light instead of a strip.

My soft boxes also have a grid in them and this is shown in the highlight on the bottle.

I am not a great wine drinker, so the first bottle I found, was in fact one I had kept for photographing at some point. I was then going to find a wine bottle and try that and remove the grids, but my studio got taken over by Nat, photographing other bits so the other bottle shots will have to follow later.

I think there is some improvement to be made on this so will have another go and show the results too.

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