Hi, I'm Karl Taylor and I've got less than 10 minutes to convince you how good
our pro training stuff really is. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you
through a professional level product shoot here and show you it all
step-by-step, completely free, just to give you an insight into our knowledge
and what we can do for you. So let's take a look at the setup and
we'll break it down, show you the lighting, show you how we make a shot
like this work and hopefully you'll be able to take away something from this
that will give you a better insight into this type of photography, which is often
considered quite difficult because liquids, bottles, glass product
photography can be quite a difficult shooting scenario but I'm going to break
it down into some simple step-by-step sequences for you. So let's take a look
at the set, okay I've got a sheet of black perspex as my base. Sometimes
called acrylic, melamine - different things - it's a glossy black plastic basically. It's
commonly used in product photography, a lot of jewellery photography, liquids,
bottles. Here I'm using it because it gives a beautiful reflection of the
product, gives a very classy look and classy feel to the product. I've got one light
here at the moment which is just putting a light onto the label of the bottle, you
can see the shadow from my fingers there on the bottle, and we'll come back to
that in a little bit, in a little bit more detail shortly. On the background here if
you come round this side I've got a light on my background which is creating
a gentle glow, it looks quite harsh at the moment because the modelling lights
on full power, but this is creating a gentle glow on the background just to
give us a little bit of light above our horizon at the back edge of the picture.
Now my depth of field for this shot is only going to run the depth of the
whiskey bottle to make sure the bottle and the label is sharp, I'm going to keep
the glass out of focus. Now some other key things on the back here are some
reflector cutout panels, if you have a look at these
things you can see I've got some bits of card, gold foil card, that I'm using
carefully positioned behind the liquids to bounce the light from my main light
sources over on this side through the liquids to give them a lovely rich glow
to bring the product to life. Let's go back round the other side and take a
look at the main lighting. So if we look on this side you'll see I've got two
softboxes, I've got two thin strip light type softboxes. One of them you can see
here at the front is a little bit further away from my trace and the other
one is a little bit closer. Now the tracing paper is used to diffuse my
softboxes even further because I don't want to get a really harsh strip light on the
bottle I want a lovely graduated soft light and the reason I've got two of
these lights is so that I can get one light as an edge light down the bottle
and one as a general light on the bottle. So what we're going to do is we're going
to film through another camera to allow you to see what each light is doing on
the bottle so you can fully understand the lighting setup that we've got here,
we're also going to film the results of what those reflectors do that are behind
the glass and the whiskey bottle so you can appreciate how important they are to
the shot and we are going to get a really stunning image out of this and
this setup will show you how easy it is. Now you might be thinking "Oh actually I
don't have necessarily this particular type of softbox" or "I'm not using fancy
studio lighting like this", well interestingly these particular soft
boxes by Broncolor these have a speed ring adapter so you can even attach a
strobe or normal flash gun to this type of softbox to shine it through so you
could create most of this setup even with pretty basic lighting, oh there's
one other thing we need to look at just come around this side, you'll see as well
as the two softboxes here I've got this piece of black card
and if you have a look here this black card is shielding this softbox so that
I'm not getting any light spill from this softbox hitting my background
because if I take this away you'll see when we look through the other camera
the light that would hit the background and spoil shot. So let's take a look at
each of these lights and what each of them are doing. Okay, forgot to mention
before about the ice in the glass - fake ice, this is an acrylic ice cube. These
are readily available from most studio suppliers so I've got a couple of those
fake ice cubes, obvious reason - doesn't melt, won't cause us any problems, stays
where we need it to stay. So let's start looking at what's happening on this
bottle. What I want to do is break it all down and then put it all back so you can
see exactly what's going on. So Fabian is going to take these lights
out, so I'd like you to do Fabian is take the two softboxes out completely. You
can leave them switched on because we just need a bit of light so we can see
what we're doing but just take them out. Okay so we're left now with a piece of
trace and you can see a light on the bottle, now that light on the bottle is
from this light that I spoke about earlier, this is just a little projection
light that allows you to pinpoint a specific area of light, now this is a
projection light with a lens in it which allows me to focus the light or defocus
it so I've softened it slightly and it's got what's called gobos, which are little
adjusters which allow me to reduce the size or the box of the light to a
specific size that I choose. Now you could use a snoot, you could use
something a little bit more simple, a little bit more cost-efficient but this
is particularly useful for product photography work, for highlighting little
details and labels. You'll also also notice now that the illumination through
the liquid has completely disappeared because Fabian is taken away our main
lighting which was hitting the reflectors behind the liquids and
bouncing through them so now that main lighting has gone
we've lost that effect. Now we've got the tracing paper attached to a big C-stand
with a big rod going over the top for that roll to hang from, we're going to
take that out as well to start with but at the moment we've got this attached
which is just a shield to stop the lights hitting the back, just a piece of
card. I'm going to take that out as well and put that back in in a minute. So what
I want to demonstrate, actually we won't take this out will just spin this just
to make it a little bit easier so I'm just going to spin that out the way, is
that get clear past that light? Because what I want you to see is how nasty the
light would be if we weren't using the trace. So Fab, if I can get you to take
that softbox and put it in, yeah round about here just you can see. Now look at
the lighting on that label on the bottle. Sorry, just my filter gels had fallen
off on the back here. If you look at the lighting on the bottle now you'll see
we've got this harsh horrible block of light and this is a common mistake made
when people try to illuminate glassware or bottles is using this very defined
rectangular light that doesn't gradate away and that's the reason
for the tracing paper is to create a gradation of light. So we definitely
don't want that - that demonstrates that we need the tracing paper to give the
effect that I want to achieve on this bottle. So let's take that light out Fab.
Now we'll put the tracing paper back in, so it's just a roll of tracing paper
that we've doubled up. Just going to spin that back into position and if we look
at the bottle, as Fabian now introduces the backlight into position, watch what
happens to the bottle. Stop there Fab. So you've got a lovely soft light already
starting to create there but this light is to create an edge light on the bottle
so that we just get a nice light down one edge of the bottle
to separate it from the background. So if you push it into position now please
Fabian, you'll see that light become a little bit stronger and create a lovely
line down the edge of our bottle. What I want you to do now Fabian is to just
flick that light on and off a second so they can see the effect of it. That's it,
back on again, and now just pull it out further away so
they can see the shape of the light change based on the distance. There you
go, so you can see that light enlarging, and then slide the light over towards
this direction so you can see how it will wrap around the bottle and light the
bottle differently on each time. So we're going to put that light back into its
correct position and that will give us the edge light. Now the problem that
we've got from that light at the moment is that we will get some of that light
spilling onto our background because that light, I can see that light here and a
lot of that light is going to come and hit my dark grey background which is
going to ruin the shot because I want to just control the light on the background
with this background light here. So that's why we bring in the card. So this
black card is going to attach to our C-stand to create what we call a flag
to stop any light from getting through onto our background, which we certainly
don't want, and that basically is it - just attaching a piece of card to act as a
shield to stop the light coming through onto the background. Then moving on from
that, we're going to bring the main light in now. So this is the main fill light on
the bottle and you can see that lovely extra light that's just coming on the
bottle there now, and if you push that light in really close Fabian you can
watch it change quite dramatically, the harshness of the light as it comes
through the trace, you can still see it's got that lovely soft diffusion from the
trace but it has become harsher as it's got closer to trace. This time take it
right back please Fabian. There you go, see it change again and then bring it
back into its correct position. So that's the positioning on my lights, the key
lights for the bottle. You've seen the light for the label and then my final
light is this light that is on the background. So I've just got
a glow of light running over the background here and this glow of light
we can attach different gels onto it so I've just got a couple of neutral
density gels but if you wanted to change the glow of light on the background to
be an orange or a red just attach one of those gels over the light, it's as simple
as that. In this instance I'm going to stick with the ordinary grey background
with a glow of light radiating up and then graduating out to a
dark grey. Now the other key elements are these reflectors, these two reflectors,
we've got a couple of reflectors behind the bottles okay and what you need to
see is how they affect the shot, so hopefully through camera now you will be
able to see as I turn these, you'll be able to see how they are affecting the
light coming through the liquid. So you have to be quite careful with these,
quite specific to cut them to the right size to suit the bottle, to suit the
shape so that you don't see them behind the bottle. And that's the key point -
so that they reflect the light through the bottle but you don't see
them behind the bottle, so you do spend a little bit of time cutting these out and
figuring out the shape correctly and then you're basically bouncing light from
your main light source into that reflector, through the liquid to create
the lovely glow through the liquid. Now I'm not sure if I've got that correctly
positioned, you'll notice we've got one other little bit of reflector card taped
to the back of the bottle and that's because I needed to get the light
through the neck of the bottle just right and this reflector wasn't doing it
quite right, so we just attached another reflector on the back of it.
That's about it, the rest of it is down to the positioning of your liquids, where
your horizon line is and then your depth of field. I've got the camera almost
ready in position which I'm then going to shoot the shot and we're ready to go. One
other point to mention is this side of the bottle does not have any light on it
because you've got no light source coming from this side only the two main
lights from there, so just to catch a little bit of an edge light I will take
an additional shot with this reflector card in just to pick up a little bit of
light down the neck of the bottle and then I'll use that image to
comp into the main shot to finish it off because the camera is not moving, the
products not moving so it's going to be very simple just to take that additional shot
to comp it in. Now ideally I'd love to take the shot all in one go but I would
have to position this card quite a way out of shot because I'm taking this shot
in a landscape version and in doing so it would be too far away to give enough
illumination so I'm going to have to do this just as a two-shot setup - so one
shot be there then the main shot and the two will be joined together. So it just
needs to slide over towards the tracing paper please, that's it, perfect, there you
go, so now it's hidden. The one behind the glass I think needs to slide a little
bit more as well, and back a bit towards you just to hide it, sorry keep going, keep
going, keep going and just rotate it a little bit... yeah there we go that should
do it, we've got a nice glint through there and then if you can turn the
background light on again, and that creates our background light over our
horizon, and that's basically it. So yes if you had to start from scratch setting
this up is a little bit more complex, does take a bit of time but you can see
in actual fact this isn't magic, you know, this is just basically physics
science mixed with a bit of art and by overcoming the problems of lighting by
creative solutions you can achieve great results and that's what our training
really offers, we go very in-depth showing you exactly how to achieve these
types of shots and far more complex pictures. So I'm going to get started
taking this shot, you can see the result and hopefully that's given you a good
insight into what Karl Taylor photography can do for you.