Light and glass.

[Irma]

Thank you so much for your kind comments on my pictures of wine glasses. I tried here to share what I did to get those pictures.

My setup and work in this series was inspired by the book Light Magic & Science.

When I took this pictures I had very little room to work my lights and also instead of softbox, I used my 75cm. light
tend, with a studio flash inside. I had problems to move easily my light, as the light tend was on a structure I did
on a chair with two plastic boxes and the LT on top.... I am sure that with a softbox things would have been easier.



#1 My idea in this one was just to paint the verticals of the glass. It was meant to be more an abstract a bit artistic. I might try this again, as it was my first try possibly I get the reflections better next time. (For those who have the book I tried to do the black background as in page 165 picture #7.11 with the glasses brighter).

So, what I did in this picture was to place a black background not bigger than what I needed to fill my picture and
the rest was white background so all the light reflected would be white. I place my softbox very close and parallel to
the line of glasses so the light was reflected in both edges as I wanted equally bright and I just have one softbox I
place in the same line but in the left side a big sheet of styrofoam more or less 1m high and not more than 50cm
wide. My light was at the right and the refector at the left. I cover part of the LT with black cloth not to be so wide.

I placed the glasses in a sheet of Plexiglass to give light in the foreground with a reflection.
Unfortunatelly I never thought about taking a picture of my setup... I'll do it next time.

This was taken with my macro lens, manual mode, l/200 sec., f11, iso 100, ev0.
The book also talk about exposure correction. So I corrected my contrast with curves in raw file.




These two were taken with a flash under the table facing the background. I place the glass in a white background under a black wider background to paint with black the edges (verticals) of the glass. Here we have the effect in the brim of the glass now they are white as they reflect the background.

Here is a picture to give the idea of the setup..



and here we see that if I have my white background narrower I have a better reflection in the edges.



These are original pictures. As you see they needed a bit of exposure correction with curves.

I tried to put all this into practice and make a usable picture, I work with this glass of tequila... Working with liquids in the glass is a bit more difficult, because the liquid also plays its part in the reflections.




edited...

Forgot to show my color correction picture.




Here we can see how the reflection in the edges are different in the place where there is liquid and where there is none. I don't really know how to make them match, or if it looks well as it is.

What I like a lot about this book is that they talk about differnent sorts of lights, and how they behave on different surfaces. Also it talks about lighting in portrait photography. I sincerely recommend to read the book.

And here is the technique, unfortunatelly, I haven't been able to make an interesting picture with this techique, a nice still life picture.

Do you think that light and glass would be a strong subject for a still life picture?

Hope you find my writing useful...

[slejhamer]

Very good write-up; thanks!

[wulinka]

Irma,

I have too little experience doing still life to follow all you have done for this,
but I am impressed by your diligence and I absolutely think, that glass and light are
a wonderful topic for still life. you are moving in the right direction, I like your thoughts about
glass, liquids, basically colorless material where you only work with the difference in difraction indices (?)....

Go for it!

Uli

[Irma]

Your are welcome Mitch...

Uli, thanks a lot for the encouragement....

At this moment, I feel a bit down as I have tried already for several times to take pictures of flowers and they simply don't work as they used to... As if I had lost the idea of flowers pictures.

I will setup again all my scaffolding for my softbox and try with colorful bottles I got few weeks ago.

[wulinka]

sometimes things seem to "stop working", I know that feeling and I am sure a lot of us have experienced it.

But you have been doing so many things! at least you never seem to run out of new ideas!

as for the glass, I particularly liked the idea, that the glass was clear and transparent, instead of colored glass.
In this way, your pictures are all about light, an interesting topic.

good luck, Uli