A Creechure’s PhotoBlog

Well it’s official. I’m now a blogger. I intend for this blog to be a central forum where I can share my photography tips, tricks, behind the scene pics, and other photography goodness relating to product/food photography and of course, the occasional car shoot. Every time I pick up the camera it seems I learn something and I hope that I can pass off some of this knowledge to you. I think I’ll christen my blog with the build up of one of my latest pictures, the Miller Lite ice pic.

I’m fairly happy with the little rig I came up with to light the ice and the bottle. So first I raided my garage and found a fairly large clear container. I then placed a white piece of paper and placed it at the bottom of the clear container. Next I got a piece of black foam core and trimmed it so it would fit snuggly inside of the clear container.

Ice is a really difficult subject to shoot. You have to make sure it doesn’t look flat and to do that you need to have dark stuff around it. The reason the foam core is black, as opposed to white in this case, is to create that contrast in the ice. Next, I cut out the general shape of the bottle and lots of little holes for light to shine through.

I propped it up inside of the clear container several inches above the base of the container. What this is going to do is allow me to light the ice from below. By shining a light under the black foam core, the light will reflect off the white paper and bounce up through all the holes I cut.

Next I placed the bottle in its hole and then filled the container with ice. You’ll notice that I propped the container at like a 70 degree angle. The reason for this was 1) The flatter the angle, the more visible the air pocket that forms in the beer due to it not being completely full 2) The steeper the angle, the harder it is to stack ice. It took a long time to get right because ice kept wanting to fall down as it melted.

As far as light setup goes, it was pretty simple. Two softboxes, camera right and left. And then one bare light behind the container and another bare light to the left of the container.