I truly love taking photographs of products. Something about playing around in the studio with lights to make an image that looks great has a calming effect on me. I am always looking for items to practice with and while picking up groceries this past week I looked over at the bottled water and saw some elegantly designed Neuro water bottles. I quickly grabbed a few for my photo project this week.
Right before I started to take the photo I asked my fiancé whether I should shoot the bottle with a symmetrical or an asymmetrical light set up. After a quick explanation of what I meant she quickly said, “Asymmetrical! Do something different.”
Like most people I get in a rhythm of how I do things. Most of my bottles are shot with symmetrical lighting and on a black background. She was right... Challenge excepted!
My lighting was rather simple, but produced a great image. The background was a light-box shot through a diffusion panel. To create the dark line on the left side of the bottle I placed a strip of black card stock on the left side just out of frame. Because this didn't cover the diffusion panel in its entirety the panel created a small strip of light to the right of the dark edge.
On the right side I placed another diffusion panel. Behind this I placed two strip-boxes. The one in the back was placed close to the panel at a angle to create a strip of light with a slight gradient towards the center. The gap between the light from the background panel and side panel created a nice dark line that I think compliments the light line on the other side.
The second strip-box was placed further away from the panel in order to light the right side of the bottle. The diffusion panel allows the light to gently wrap around to the front of the bottle.
A fourth light with a grid and snoot was used to light the left side of the label with as little light spilling on the rest of the bottle as possible. I used a polarizing gel on the light and a polarizing filter on my camera to eliminate any glare/hot spot coming from this specular light source.
With the lights set I could have stopped there but there were two things that bothered me. First, the light on the front left was diffracting through the bottle creating nasty highlights on the right edge on the bottle. Second, the left side of the cap needed a hint of light.
I could have fixed both problems with levels and the clone stamp in Photoshop but I decided the to shoot separate images and composite them together instead. I used four images total. The first image was a base image with all the lights on. The second image had the snoot light off to remove the highlights on the right. The third image I held a card in place to reflect light on the cap. Lastly, I made an extra image with a reflector card to lighten the silver lines in the red neck label.
Compositing the image together was pretty standard. I had some subtle gradient issues in the main portion of the bottle. Also, the water is slightly carbonated. I tried to keep some of the bubbles but took them out because they just appeared to be dust or spots on the bottle.
I feel like this project was simple in execution compared to some of my other shots but came out really nice. If you would like to see some of my other product photographs check out the rest of my website.