Photographing Wine Bottle With Only One Light Source

I think that any bottle (glass) product photograph is both quite challenging and also very rewarding. The main challenge comes from being able to constrain the reflections, make them soft and elegant and and to use them to your profit in order to create an interesting image. This type of product photography can get complicated pretty fast, especially when you’re dealing with many weird reflections and light sources. Therefore, sometimes the simplest solutions are the best. I have recently photographed a Rusack Wine Bottle and I started off with my typical setup and two light sources. My vision of the final image was a clean, classic and elegant image of the bottle but I also wanted to make it challenging for myself. The challenge? To have the already black bottle on black background.

Speed light behind white plexiglass

Two black foam board on each side

I eliminated one of the lights after several trials and errors (mostly errors of trying to use the lights on both sides of the bottle). I placed the remaining speedlight behind the bottle and put a white plexiglass between the light source and the bottle. Next, I placed two black foam core boards on each side of the bottle in order to have black background. I left a very tiny space (not visible in the final picture) just behind the bottle for the light to go through. Last but not least, I used two white foam boards on each side of the bottle in order (see pic below) to get nice highlights on both sides. Once I photographed the bottle, it was time for the wine glass. I simply placed the glass in the background, a bit to the right from where the bottle was standing and I repositioned the white foam boards to have the highlights uniform on both sides of the glass. I ended up having two images which I brought to Photoshop for editing.

Creating day at night with baking/parchment paper

There is very little daytime in winter, which often creates a challenge for using natural sunlight for product photography . I’ve recently had a client for whom I had to create an image as if it was shot during the day with a window in the background - the challenge: shoot it after sunset.

I knew right away that I needed to place a speed light outside the window. Windows are great for getting soft light but in this case it wouldn’t be enough. I have a large piece of white fabric which I often place between the lights and the subject but I wanted to try something new this time - baking paper. I heard a few times before from fellow photographers about this 'hi-tech technology’ (can you sense my sarcasm 😃 ) and I thought it was a perfect opportunity for me to try it myself. 

The process was quite simple: I taped the baking paper (I guess it’s also called parchment paper) to the window and I placed the speedlight in the softbox outside. I was worried at first that the light would be not only too directional but also too harsh but it actually turned out pretty well I think.

You don't need a big camera, you need big lights

So what happens when a photographer finishes his work early and has nothing and nobody to photograph? He shoots self-portraits - at least that's what I did. I had some spare time in the photo studio after finishing my work, so I decided to shoot a self-portrait. To give myself a challenge, I decided to use my point-and-shoot Nikon P7800 to take these pictures. Why was it a challenge? Because my point-and-shoot is not compatible with the flash transceivers used in the studio. I had to shoot using only the ambient light from the modeling lights. 

Photographer's Self-Portrait

So how did I shoot my self-portrait? First and foremost, I put my point-and-shoot on a tripod. The modeling lights were very weak so I had to decide how to set the shutter speed, ISO and aperture. Because Nikon P7800 gives quite a lot of noise at higher ISO, I decided to keep it as low as possible. After playing around with exposure in the manual mode, I decided to use a shallow depth of field (low f-value). With ISO 80 and f/2.2 I got the shutter speed of 1/50 second. With the camera on a tripod and remembering that I shouldn't move, I set my camera on delayed exposure. 

Thabo's mini camera - a camera for a teddy bear

It turns out that Thabo, our teddy bear, has been interested in photography for awhile. He has been asking me all kinds of questions about photography, for example about composition and lighting. I think he really looks like natural light, especially the golden hour sunset and sunrise light. I decided to buy him a came so that he could start taking pictures. Because he is a rather small teddy bear, I had to look for a camera that wasn't too big and too heavy for him. It wasn't easy to find such a camera but I think he's really happy with it. Oh, have I mentioned that he assisted me during a food photo shoot?

Thabo (a teddy bear) with his new mini camera assisting during a food photo shoot

Something different: Timelapse video - making pierogi

I have something different for you this time - a video timelapse from my kitchen. My wife and I are Polish but we currently live in the US (Memphis, Tennessee). This was our first Christmas in the US but unlike the US Christmas, Polish Christmas is mainly celebrated on the Christmas Even which is on December 24. We organized the Christmas dinner with a couple of Polish friends here in Memphis, everyone cooking something.

There are many traditional Polish Christmas dishes, one of them are pierogi (dumplings). My wife and I made so many of them (around 400!!!) that I had to record the process of making them, just for fun :) The result is this video:

Behind the Scenes: Abandoned Building Photo Shoot in Brussels, Belgium HD

BTS (Behind the Scenes) of a photo shoot in an abandoned building in Brussels (Belgium). This was my lost photo shoot in Belgium (in May 2013) before moving to the US.

The Joker Make-up Time-lapse

After several weeks of silence from my side, I want to share with you my very first time-lapse video I made out of the pictures when shooting the Joker campaign. The pictures and a blog article about the shoot will come soon (I hope :) ). 

Assisting and Behind the Scenes with Bert Stephani

Bert Stephani has posted recently a blog article "Be an Assistant". I had a great pleasure to be his assistant in his recent Diva Shoot, where he invited a bunch of women to his studio (called 'The Barn), and he shot portraits in two different sets. We met a week before the shoot to prepare the sets, which was also lots of fun. Although my assisting during the shoot was mainly about taking behind the scenes pictures, I have to say that even during such assisting, I learned a lot.

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However, assisting is so much more than learning how to take pictures. While you learn, you also observe things that you might have already knew before, which is also a great thing to remember these for the future. Basically, the things you knew before get better embedded in your memory and the likelihood that you will forget them in your next photo shoot gets much smaller.

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But assisting is so much more than that. You also learn how to talk to and approach a client during a photo shoot (especially because every client is different) and you can learn much more than the photo shoot while talking with a photographer after a shoot. Although I was just shooting behind the scenes pictures and I helped Bert with preparing the sets a week before, I learned a lot! Make sure to check Bert's website and portfolio at http://bertstephani.com.

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