17 Jun 2013

Four Light Product Photo of Baileys' Liqueur

A (reasonably) simple three light product shot of a bottle of Baileys' Liqueur. But how to set up the lights to get this effect? Answer below the photograph of the very yummy Baileys'.


The rim highlight you see on the edge of the bottle is from two strip lights behind the subject, one on either side and about 10" out from each side.
The background light is a gridded reflector with a sheet of round plastic inside to give the smooth glow.
Finally a snoot about 3' directly above the camera, aimed at an angle down and onto the bottle to light up the label.
The bottle is standing on a small sheet of glass out of a cheap frame someone bought me for Christmas, cleaned and polished... but the edge is a little too rough for my liking.
The sheet of glass is standing on four drinking glasses.

Below you can see the subject with each of the three lights on individually so you can see what each one does and you can also see the sheet of glass and the glasses.


This took about 30 minutes to set up and then the actual shooting was all over in just a couple of minutes, then it took a few more minutes to transfer the images to my computer and about 10 minutes to process, and then another 30 minutes to break the lighting setup down again! Which just goes to show, the actual photographing is really just a small part of what photographers do! :-)

3 comments:

  1. Wow, awesome work....should make money from this!

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  2. Many thanks for the setup details. How did you get rid of the specular highlights seen on the "snoot image"

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    Replies
    1. Simple bit of cloning in a photo editor to clean it up. I think I used Paintshop Pro X5, but Photoshop, Lightroom, the Gimp etc. will do the job just as well.

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