So, a few years back I decided I wanted to take a nice professional looking picture of some wine bottles…and I did.
Just recently I decided that I wanted to make a series of wine bottle pictures for my living room. Unfortunately, we don’t sell that brand at work anymore (and I wanted all the pictures to be of the same brand) so I had to start from scratch. Listed below are my photography woes:
1)I must have really been in the zone that day, for the life of me I couldn’t reproduce the shallow DOF I had in that picture.
2)I forgot that I’m terrible…utterly awful at cutting out backrounds, I can try erasing it, masking, a monotone backdrop and selecting that color etc etc etc it always comes out very choppy. So I decided to go out and buy a backdrop that more or less matches my wall color and make it part of the picture…
I also have a neon green backdrop that I thought would work, but since wine bottles are all reflective and transparent, it doesn’t work very well for this application.
3)For some reason my first backdrop (grey) and my new one (tan) look identical once uploaded to my computer. I assume that it has to do with the lighting I’m using, 4 bright halogen lights and the white balance on the camera. I’ve played with RAW in the past, maybe I’ll look at that again.
4)My SD card reader just broke. So until I can get to a store, I have to plug my camera into the computer…I don’t like doing that.
5)When I get into camera mode I have a tendency to start spending money. I’d like to buy a proper set of lights, but I don’t want to spend they money on it, well I do, but I’m trying to save money right now, not spend it. Also, I’d like to buy something to wireless send the pictures to my computer as I take them, again, don’t want to spend the money on it right now.
Eventually I’m sure I’ll get all my settings tweaked just right, then it’s easy. I love it when I get everything right where I need it and I can just swap out the object, flip the lights on, hit the shutter release and be confident I got a picture that I can use, but I’ve been working on this for a few days now and I’m just not getting there.
What kind of camera are you using? The shallow depth of field comes from having a low aperture value (use Av mode if you have an SLR).
Also make sure your monitor color and gamma calibration is correct. Very important when you are working with photos, and could be a possible cause of your color issue.
It’s a Nikon D70 and I calibrated my monitor a while back. I had the aperture stopped down as low as I could get it when I tried to recreate that picture and I still wasn’t getting quite what I wanted. I wish I could remember the exact setup, but based on where I took the picture last time I’m guessing I had the front and back bottles much further apart then my current setup (they could have been as much as 2 or 3 feet apart) and, while I don’t remember doing it, I could have had the camera 10 or 15 feet away and zoomed in. Something I don’t have space for in my current setup.
I’ll keep chugging along, eventually I’ll get what I’m looking for.
I know, that’s why I said I set it as low as I could get it (for however far I had it zoomed in), instead of giving you an exact number. Next time I go to that computer, I’ll see what the F-Stop was for that picture and what the focal length was…I don’t think, off the top of my head, that my two lenses overlap (I believe I have a 30-70 and a 70-300), so the focal length will tell me which lens I used.
What lenses do you have? Stepping back and using a telephoto with an open aperture should do it.
As for your background, why not just use the LR wall? Would be a cool effect when framed, if you can manage to get the lighting even and the WB right. Try aiming a light from each side at the opposite side. IOW, do cross the beams.
For white balance, if you don’t have a grey card, take a shot with a piece of printer paper in the scene. Then, it’s easy to use your eyedropper tool in RAW converter to set the WB, or adjust in Photoshop to be 255, 255, 255.
Can’t help with wanting to buy more equipment. I haven’t yet reached Step 12 of the program.
For various logistical and quality of paint issues, I don’t think that would work.
My current backdrop is over a white sheet that I was using for something else. The white is hanging out over the edge so I used that and some of the other parts of the picture blew out when I tried. Well, they didn’t totally blow out, but nothing looked right when I did it. That’s why I’m thinking between my lights and my camera, something just isn’t jiving and I’m not figuring it out.
I’ve got a few more ideas, something will work. My next thought is to ruffle the backdrop and re-adjust the lights and let the shadows play into the picture. I’m thinking that if I give the backdrop some depth the color might correct itself. The other thing I need to try (for a different setup where the bottles are only one deep) is to raise the F-Stop, leave the shutter open much much longer (closer to a second) and seriously reduce the amount of lights. I’ve had good luck doing that in the past.
Well, ruffling up the backdrop made for an interesting scene which was ruined by what looks like a piece of hair on the lens. I’m done for the night with taking more pictures. But I’ll pursue this setup later. It’ll still need some tweaking done both IRL and on photoshop. Four lights and anywhere between three and 12 bottles is a lot of reflections to clone out.
f/4 should give you a DOF of less than one bottle. Sounds like your lighting is relatively dim if you need 1/13 second.
A trick for up-close shots of shiny reflective things is to mask the camera by taking a sheet of poster board roughly the same color as the background, cutting a lens-sized hole in the middle and shooting through that. At worst, there will be a black dot reflected in the subject, but it’ll be a lot easier to 'shop out than your body, a tripod or the rest of the room. You’ll need to fool around with keeping it flat or curving it back around yourself as well as where to place lights, but it’s so much easier now than not all that long ago where you’d have to shoot and pray and wait for proofs to come back from the lab.
f/4 should give you a DOF of less than one bottle. Sounds like your lighting is relatively dim if you need 1/13 second.
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At that time I was probably using one or two 200 Watt incandescent bulbs, now I’ve got 4 of those big ass halogen lights that painters use.
Never thought of that. Luckily I’ve had little problem with seeing the camera (only once) I tend to get reflections from all the lighting. If it’s really getting on my nerves I hang white tablecloths or sheets in front of the lights to diffuse it. Only had once close call, I caught it before it actually ignited.
Poor Joey:( Most of that stuff happened to me when I was doing an assignment for “Photography” as an elective for my degree. Worse even!!! and I had to do the whole thing over.
I’d dismantled the super wonderful still life before I realised that the whole thing had bombed out.
Anyway, the kindly tutor gave me a Distinction for the second effort. I think the mark was for effort rather than content:P
I think I almost bought that one a few years ago when I needed something really fast. I was trying to take a picture of a spark, but I went a different route and got the picture with one of my other lenses.
Put my long lens on, it doesn’t stop down quite as far, but I started getting the effect I’m looking for. I think I’m just going to have to re-arrange my room so I can shoot the long way or move my area out to the unfinished part of the basement so I can put the camera 20 feet away and zoom in.
RAW helped, but I’ve really never worked with it, so I’ll have to learn how to use Photoshop’s RAW converter/processor. Any tips for camera or computer settings when I’m using halogen lights?
