The Wine Bottle Project - Part One
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.
