You are going to be seeing a lot of this wine bottle for a little while. I wanted to do a “simple” studio shot for my portfolio, and I’ve decided to turn it into a long term project. Unfortunately that means I don’t get to drink the wine anytime soon.

The Project

My idea is to get shots of the same wine bottle in three different environments and chronicle the details of each shoot.

In this post I’ll be detailing the “simple” studio shot. In future posts the wine bottle will be making appearances outside, and at an as-yet-to-be-determined inside location.

The “simple” studio shot

Of course nothing is ever simple when you want things done right, and so it goes with the studio shot of the wine bottle.

I want the shot for my portfolio showing the wine bottle on a pure white background. Most sellers of wine (my target audience) would want their bottles shot in a similar fashion for web and advertising use.

I started out with a card table (happened to have a black top), covered with a thick sheet of glass. I put up a white backdrop behind the table with a flash under the table pointed at the backdrop. I added barndoors to the strobe under the table to control the light better.

To camera left I put up a strobe with a stripbox. The stripbox was positioned so it went from just under the table to above the bottle. I knew I would need some fill on the right side of the bottle (camera right) so I put up a white bounce panel.

That first shot turned out OK. Then I realized the ‘RA’ in the label was reflective. To give the letters their best quality in the shot I needed to add white bounce cards so the gold would show up properly. The cards are shown in the diagram above. They make a big difference.

Since I was going to be cutting the wine bottle out of the background and turning it all white in Photoshop I could have left it and been done. What I didn’t like about the photo is the background isn’t quite white enough everywhere, and the table is darker than I wanted.

To get the table brighter I added a piece of white foam core between the table and the glass. For the background I turned to a large softbox. I took the strobe from the floor and put it on a stand and switched the barn doors for a large softbox. Then I put the softbox at the end of the table pointed directly at the camera. This would give me a nice even white background. Here’s what this setup looks like.

Much nicer. The background is now an even bright white, easy to remove with Photoshop if desired. The table is a nice clean even surface and brighter than before. Now the only thing left that I wanted to fix is on the shoulder of the bottle.

Notice how the white from the background shows itself just below the neck of the bottle. Upon closer inspection both sides of the bottle all the way down had a thin strip of white. If you have ever tried to select a white background that bleeds a bit onto your subject it makes for a time consuming process. Best to remove the white reflections from the bottle.

To remove the reflections I had to add two black panels behind and to the sides of the bottle. You can see them in the shot below and in the lighting diagram.

Which brings us back to the first image again. From setting up all the equipment until the final image was taken was approximately 2 hours. The final bottle image has the table removed and replaced with pure white, and a bit of color correction for the label and a little tweaking for the Red and RA portions of the label.

Lighting diagrams created using the tools at The Online Lighting Diagram Creator.

Digital Photography, Recent Work Set Design Diagram, Wine, Wine Bottle Project

A recent assignment had me shooting in downtown Bellevue in the middle of the day to get the exterior shot you see below. The day was absolutely perfect. Just look at those clouds. See anything glaringly wrong with the picture? Maybe the huge semi-truck parked in the lower right?

Great Sky, Good Exposure, Bad Truck

I waited around as long as I could, but the truck didn’t leave. Drat. I considered using Photoshop to recreate the area where the truck was. That would take some time. I considered outsourcing to a professional retoucher. That would be more money.

Luckily this was during the string of really nice weather we had in August and the next day was going to be nice too. So I returned to the same spot the next day at the same time. Yeah, no big truck this time. But the day wasn’t as nice.

Boring Sky, Good Exposure, NO TRUCK!

I tried setting up in the exact same spot, with the tripod extended to it’s full height and used the same lens. Unfortunately it’s nearly impossible to get it framed exactly the same. Thankfully it was close enough. I brought the two images into Photoshop, adjusted the second days image to match closely to the first. Then taking out the truck was a breeze.

Great Sky, Great Exposure, No Truck.

Digital Photography, Recent Work Bellevue, exterior, photoshop

I shot the houseboat below for a client recently and a couple of images stood out during the shoot that are interesting in a photographic sense.

The first is this fun exterior with the Aurora bridge. Nothing technically challenging with this, but I like the way the bridge overhead and reflected below frame the house nicely. Shot with a 24-70 lens at 24mm with a circular polarizer to help out the blue sky.

Photography is "Problem Solving 101"

The second shot artistically is less interesting but there is more problem solving going on than first meets the eye.

First: I’m on a houseboat. Houseboats float and move with the waves. Which means I need to keep a fairly high shutter speed. Not too much of a problem since the scene if already very bright.

Second: I’m trying to shoot a “deck” which in reality is a “dock”. It’s floating too and much less stable than the house. See above.

Third: The contrast, or dynamic range, between the shadow area and the full sun area is too large for my camera to capture in one exposure.

Solutions

There are several ways this could be approached.

1) Use several images with different exposures and blend them together in Photoshop later. That would work fine but takes too long for this particular job. The movement of the dock and boats between frames might make this a bit tricky.

2) Use several images with different exposures and blend them automatically using an HDR or Enfusion program. That would normally be a good option, but again the potential movement of dock and boats would cause ghosting or copies of elements. Shutter speeds could increase too much trying to get a proper exposure for the shadow are and motion blur could occur.

3) Use a graduated neutral density filter and place it over the full-sun portion of the frame to bring the exposure for the two areas closer together. This works best when the shadow line is nice and straight and the shadow line in this picture isn’t straight. Also I don’t have a graduated ND filter in my kit right now.

4) Wait. I actually did wait to get the shot, but I couldn’t wait as long as I needed. Waiting is a good option and would have produced a nice result when the sun was setting or behind the nearby hill, but no time for that.

5) Use fill-flash. Since I bring my hot-shoe flashes to real estate shoots I had them available. For this sunny day it took two flashes on full power to bring the shadow area up to a relatively decent level so it still looks like shadow, but doesn’t look like a large black area.

Manage the light

Most photography is about managing the differences between the shadow and highlight areas of a scene to bring them closer together so the camera can capture the scene as our eyes see it. While there are a multitude of ways to accomplish that, it always comes down to what works best for the given situation and the effect you are trying to produce.

Digital Photography, Recent Work, Residential Real Estate bridge, fill flash, houseboat, reflection, troubleshooting

I have been shooting some jewelry for a local client that is using Etsy to showcase her designs. The pieces are very nicely done, but aren’t going to sell for thousands of dollars, so I need to be quick and efficient to manage costs. Click the images to see larger versions.

    

I decided to use my Canon 580EX flashes as they are easy to set up and very easy to change light output from the camera mounted flash. Using “hot-shoe” flashes allows the ability to change setups quickly and easily. With the ability to control light output of the off-camera flash units from the on-camera unit I don’t have to move around if the light isn’t quite right. I just make the changes at the camera and just before the next picture the changes are relayed to the off-camera units.

  

Being able to move quickly also lets us try out different sets and backgrounds and quickly determine if it will work. All of our images are taken at the clients house, so the small size is also a benefit.

    

All of these images were captured with a 24-70mm lens which also allows macro work for getting in very close to capture the details of the smaller objects like clasps.

As mentioned above these images are destined for Etsy.com. To ensure my client has the best presentation I reviewed Etsy’s image quidelines and how images are actually displayed on their site. They have several different image sizes they use on their site, and they also crop the first image for each piece into a square format that is used as a thumbnail in search results.

When I deliver images to the client I specify the first image to upload and I ensure it is cropped in such a way so the thumbnail that Etsy creates won’t cut off her piece and make it hard to see.

Having a good understanding of image standards and programming comes in handy at times and ensures my clients images look their best at all times.

Digital Photography, Recent Work hot-shoe flash, jewelry

The Luminous Landscape is one of the sites I watch on a daily basis. Micheal Reichmann always has great articles on photography as well as great guest essay’s.

Today’s guest is Art Wolfe. Most of the work we see from Art and all other photographers is the final product, the end result of sometimes lots and lots of planning, time, patience and luck. The essay Art provided gives a glimpse into what it takes to get to a great shot and what some of the hundreds of thousands of images professional photographers capture that usually never see the light of day.

Art Wolfe Essay at The Luminous Landscape: Night Fisherman

Digital Photography, Miscellaneous