In this video I'll show you how to make
some amazing still life photos with a
glass of water in your small home studio.
Hello I'm Gavin Hoey,
and you're watching Adorama TV,
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us photographers.
And in this video I'm gonna show you my
three new lenses...
yet technically they are glassware,
but if you fill them with water they will act
like a mini lens and reverse anything
that you see looking through them,
andI'm gonna use that to make some
interesting pictures in my small home
studio.
Now for this to work we need a
few things...
light first of all,
I'm gonna be using my Flashpoint
XPLOR 400, but honestly you could do
this without flash.
You could use continuous LED lights,
however LEDs not as bright as flash,
you would need a tripod because I'm
gonna be using some fairly small
apertures, then there is the base.
So I'm using this black glossy floor tile,
you could use anything similar,
or maybe a mirror or just a piece of
ordinary glass with some
black paper underneath it,
and if you don't have any of that,
I'll show you an alternative method as we go through the
video, then there's the backgrounds
pretty much anything could be a
background for this, I guess, but if you
want some free interesting backgrounds,
the ones I'm gonna use in this video are
all available completely for free on my
blog, so go check that out and download
and print them as you need.
You're gonna need some glassware and
some water,
and anything involving water instantly means
you really need to know where your towel
is, cuz this could get wet by mistake.
My towel's down there, hopefully I won't
need it, right, let's get some light set,
let's get some backgrounds in,
let's get shooting.
So my plan is to shoot three
different glasses with different
backgrounds, but the principle is going
to be the same on all of them,
it relies on the fact that the glass of water will
reverse anything that you see through it.
What about the camera settings, well
that's going to be the same as well.
I need a good depth of field for this,
I'm gonna go for f/11 on my camera,
you might find if you have something like a full
frame camera f/16 or f/22 would be a
better choice, everything else is going
to be standard settings, flash sync speed,
lowest ISO, no flash, no picture, you get
the idea.
What about the position of the light?
At the moment it's fairly central,
that might work just fine, but I just take a test
picture, well it works okay but closer
inspection of the glass, well I can
clearly see the flash reflected in the
front of the glass, and different shaped
glasses will give you better or worse
reflections, so what I've done is I've
moved the light closer to the background.
I still need even illumination on there,
but now none of the light is going to
reach the front of the glass, and that's
where the reflections were coming from
at least that's the idea, there's only
one way to find out if this actually
works, that's to take a test picture.
So same settings as I had before,
nothing's changed.
Take a test shot,
that looks a little bit underexposed.
I'm just going to increase
the power of my flash buy a stock, take
another test shot, and that looks great,.
No reflections on the glass,
I reckon we probably got this right,
so let's take a few pictures like this,
the key to this shot is symmetry.
So I'm trying to get the line going through
the glass to match up with the line going
through the background.
So for the second look I've gone for
these stripey backgrounds now if you
don't have a reflective base, here's the workaround.
Print two of them off, and use
one of them as the base, but if like me
you're using an inkjet printer it's
really important that you dry the glass
thoroughly before you put it down,
because inkjet prints are going to run
as soon as they get wet and look horrible.
So let's see how this looks.
Like any lens, this one can be refocused
and in fact moving it closer or further
away from the background will completely
change the look and feel of the shots.
So move it around,
experiment and see what
you come up with.
So for my third setup I've gone with the
fine stripey background, and this wine
glass, and of all the glasses I've used,
this is the hardest to minimise
reflections, and that brings me on to
post-processing, because there will be
some we'll get to that in a moment,
but to minimize the amount of
post-processing I have to do,
I'm gonna clean the glass now,
and I mean really clean it with a lens cloth
because any fingerprints or dust and dirt
well they're gonna seem enormous when it
comes to post-processing, and you only
want to do this once, you don't have to
repeatedly clone out the same bit of
dirt, so let's try this and once again.
Everything is the same as it was before,
only the background and the glassware
has changed, so at the moment I've only
got access to normal printing paper
rather than Matt photo paper,
so my blacks aren't very black,
and my whites aren't very white,
but I'm gonna fix that in post,
let's have a little look, so let's go find one
of the images that I want to work on,
and first thing I want to do is really crop
this image down, because it really isn't
quite the the crop that I'm after.
So I'm gonna come up to my crop tool
here in Camera Raw,
if you're a Lightroom user
this is exactly the same as the
developed module in Lightroom.
I'm gonna choose the one by one because
I think a square is the way I want to go.
I think this is gonna lend itself to a square
very nicely, it needs a bit of rotating
around, I'm just lining up the lower half
here just so I can get that sort of
about right, and then I'll square it up
inside of the frame, hit enter and that
will crop it to a nice square.
Okay the, well the blacks aren't at all black,
everything is the wrong color, let's do
the color next, so I'm gonna get the
white balance tool and click on some of
the white, because that should at least
give me a roughly right white balance,
and then the blacks now I could come
over to the the basics, and just sort of
start playing with the settings here, so
I can pull the blacks down, and the
whites up and so on, that's, that's gonna
give me an okay start, the thing is - the
top half the blacks aren't very black,
and the bottom half the whites aren't
very white, so I'm gonna fix those
individually and locally by using the
adjustment brush, so with the adjustment
brush I can paint on changes for example
the blacks, well that's gonna be shadows
and blacks so let's put those both down
to minimum, and I'll get a bigger brush
and just paint over those areas, and look
at that, that looks great now.
My blacks are going really black,
I was happy with my whites,
they looked white enough and that looks
a lot better, just doing that,
it may need a second go, in which case
just click on the new button and repeat
the process, yeah, there we go, that looks
a lot better, I'm really happy with that.
What about the whites, well I will click
on the new adjustment brush once again,
this time I'll reverse it, so I'll reset
the shadows and the blacks, but increase
the illumination on the highlights and
the whites,
and let's just paint across the base now,
that looks okay, but one thing I'm less
happy about is that sort of area just
underneath the glass, so where the glass
and the reflective tile meet - that was
where the light was pointing straight
down, and it's just bounced straight
through, there and really blown out and
my adjustments probably haven't helped.
Luckily that's an easy fix with the
adjustment brush, so let's go grab the
adjustment brush again, and this time
what I'm gonna do is make a new brush,
that is just for the the highlights and
the whites, but not so heavy, I'm going to
build the effect up a little bit more
gradually because I'm not sure how much
I need.
I can even pull the exposure...
oh there we go, yeah it, gently does it,
pull the exposure down, and that looks
about right, so the last thing I want to
do is just fix the red where the red is
looking a little bit washed out, a little
bit Orange, if anything, so let's come out
of the adjustment brush by clicking
either the magnifying glass or the hand
tool, and then I'm gonna go across here
in Camera Raw to HSL adjustments.
I'll choose the saturation option, and I'll
take the reds and the oranges up in the
saturation, because although it is
supposed to be a red line it looks more
orange, so I'll increase both of those
then I'll go back over to the hue slider,
and I'm gonna take the orange slider and
move it to the left, which makes orange
more red, and as it's the only orange in
this picture, it's gonna make that red
line absolutely zing, so there you go with a
couple of other small tweaks, and
adjustments.
There's my final picture completed,
this was a great fun shoot,
but of course you don't need exactly the
same things that I used,
in fact use whatever you've got
around the house to create something
that's different, unique and your own, and
when you do, don't forget to use the
hashtag #createnomatterwhat so we
can see exactly what you come up with,
now if you've enjoyed this video or
you've got any questions leave me a
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I'm Gavin Hoey.
Thanks for watching.