photographing wine bottles

Hi all,
I have been asked to take some photos of wine bottles and the interior of a wine shop for scanning and use on a web site. I am pretty much a beginner in these things, but I really want to do a good job for these people. I am concerned that light from a flash will be reflected and appear as a glare in my photos. How can i best combat this? Should i use flash, or no flash, there is of course artificial lighting inside the store.What would be the best film to use in this situation.
I would be extremely grateful to anyone who can give me some ideas or tips about how best to tackle this project.
Many thanks
K

I don't have a lot of experience with this type of product shooting, but I can tell you that you're right about one thing: your light source will be reflected in the bottles.

With this in mind, most pros use large softboxes or light panels to light glass bottles. While the source is reflected in the bottles, it is a broad soft light that (hopefully) creates pleasing highlights that take the shape of the curves of the glass.

One alternative to using this somewhat expensive lighting gear would be to bounce your light source off either large white panels or maybe even the ceiling.

What you want to avoid are "pin sources" of concentrated light creating hot spots on the bottles. Any light source that is wider and softer would look better.

Hope that helps...

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Originally Posted by Kylieflower

Hi all,
I have been asked to take some photos of wine bottles and the interior of a wine shop for scanning and use on a web site. I am pretty much a beginner in these things, but I really want to do a good job for these people. I am concerned that light from a flash will be reflected and appear as a glare in my photos. How can i best combat this? Should i use flash, or no flash, there is of course artificial lighting inside the store.What would be the best film to use in this situation.
I would be extremely grateful to anyone who can give me some ideas or tips about how best to tackle this project.
Many thanks
K

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Well, I'm no expert myself but I've actually done this before (still life photo of wine bottle). I don't have fancy lighting equipment and made do with what I had.

I only had a single flash unit and reflectors to get the job done. I was able to have the flash off camera so that's the first problem solved. Then came the issue of softening the light. It didn't occur to me to reflect the light like Steve suggested you might be able to do. Instead, I ended up using three diffusers "in-line" with each other so that the light ended up being pretty darn diffused by the time it reached the wine bottle. I had three diffusers and put the smallest one right in front of the flash, and second smallest after that, and the largest after that. It worked well.

I would have to agree that reflecting the light would be a good idea, if you only have a flash for on top of your camera, I would suggest using a LumiQuest light reflector. It attaches to your flash with velcro and instead of reflecting off the ceiling, reflects off the piece attached to the flash. Depending on what you get you can use different inserts to achieve different tones (i.e. gold has a warm tone, etc... ). These are inexpensive and easy to use.
Also, if you are going to do any still life shots of the wine bottles and if they don't need to be returned for selling, then I would suggest using matte spray. I used wine bottles in a shot not too long ago, and I wanted a nice muted tone to the picture, so I matte sprayed the bottles.

What equipement do you have available to you? Lighting the bottles from behind with snoots might give you a really nice effect. Most times glass objects are lighted from behind, but you need to put yours in context.

Perhaps cut out a reflector from white posterboard to go behind each bottle, that only shows behind the bottle from camera position. In other words, doesn't stick out from behind the botle. You'd have to carefully cut each one to the shape of the bottle, looking from the camera position.

Try to light the reflectors more than the bottles. That's a technique I've seen used with great results.