Wine

This week we had to setup an advertisement for a beverage in a glass bottle. In my first attempt I wanted to cast a red light over the scene. I put a red gel on the light that was covering the background and a red gel on the strobe light that was on the right side. 

In the end I was not very happy with the specular highlights I was getting on either side of the bottle. So, I redid the whole thing going for a whole different feel. After doing some research I found that most wine buyers are Men with Bachelor's degrees and professional careers. That helped me set the scene for my second attempt.

Wine Advertisement

Here's the finished product. 

Final Wine Ad

It didn’t take very long to set things up. About 20 minutes I think. I metered my camera for f/5.6 at 1/125 sec. and an ISO of 100. I used a Nikon D850 with a 28-300mm lens set at 105mm. I metered my subject and adjusted the strobes to f/5.6. I knew from last time that the flats alone would still produce a reflection that was too harsh so I added a softbox. 

At first I had one strobe on the right and one on the background. I was not happy with the reflection I was getting from the big white wall on the left and the light cast on the product was insufficient. I put another strobe and softbox on the left just in front of the product and another large flat at the left front corner of the table.

After this setup I was pretty happy with the results. I tried to get more light just on the label with a small white reflector and that worked well. I also tried using a small reflector above the camera and that worked somewhat well but not as good as I had imagined.

I was getting readings of 65-70% on the highlights when the front of the product was well lit. The shadows were a little low but the whole scene was on the darker side. After about 20 minutes of shooting, rearranging flats and gobos, I was pretty happy with the images. Then I thought I still had 2 hours left in the studio so I could try some different things. I spent another 45 minutes or so changing things around until I felt like it was the best it was going to get under these conditions. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out.

In camera RAW, I removed chromatic aberration and corrected for the lens profile. Other than that I didn’t feel it needed any other adjustments. In Photoshop, I wanted to reduce the amount of blue in the book on the table so I created a mask and desaturated that section. I also took out some dust spots on the bottle and the table with the healing brush.

Here's a look behind the scenes: