Beer or Soda?

That was the option with the latest DPChallenge theme.

I wanted to continue working on small studio setups and lighting so this challenge was great practice.  It’s hard to get the lighting right and everything to come together like it is in my mind.  This one came close.   I initially planned to have a bottle and a glass together but I didn’t have a bottle I liked (though I did go out and buy about $15 worth in beer and sodas for this.)

After many, many various arrangements I finally came up with one I liked.  For this final set-up I used a black posterboard on the table, covered with a very clean piece of plexiglass.  I use glass cleaner on everything.  Black posterboard seems to reflect better than white.  About 5-6 feet behind the glass I put a paper screen.  If I put the paper too close sometimes I can see flaws in the paper or even it’s texture.  By holding it back enough it falls beyond the field of focus.

When a flash is fired near something, its color reflects on everything near it.  Many photographers use gels on their flashes, and one day I will probably get some of those, but for now I’ve been using various colored posterboards and clothing.  I set the posterboard or a shirt near the subject and shoot the flash into it (or through it).  The reflection is nice and soft with a smooth gradient.   Here I used a piece of yellow posterboard set up behind my paper screen.  I angled the board so I could shoot directly at it and let it reflect into the paper screen.  As you can see in the background the yellow is lightly visible and in the table it’s reflected darker because of the black posterboard below the plexiglass.

On either side of the beer glass I set white opaque acetate screens (they’re more like frosted clear).  Beyond those I have two 4-foot fluorescent 2-tube shop lights standing on end facing the screens.  I use daylight bulbs in the lights because they match the temperature of my flash best.  This way I don’t have to mess with white balance issues.  I also like these lights because they don’t get hot.

For equipment I’m using a dslr in manual mode, manual focus 50mm lens on a tripod, and a remote flash triggered by a cheap (piece of crap) cactus junk trigger, (someone please buy me some radiopoppers or pocketwizards for my birthday).  I don’t have the slightest idea how to do this in any automatic modes.

Now because I use a combination of a flash (single burst) with the fluorescent lights (which remain on the whole time) I have to play around with the shutter and aperture settings a bit to get the right combination for the best exposure.  I use the aperture to control the light from the flash and the shutter to control the light from the fluorescents.  Since the flash is a single short duration burst I start by deciding the DOF I want for the shot and set the aperture accordingly.  If it seems a bit bright I set the flash setting to low or move the light back some.  I’m using a cheap flash with only two settings; full power or 1/2 power.   Because the flash duration is so short the shutter speed is almost irrelevant, as long as I’m not too fast as I can only sync at about 1/125 sec.

To control the fluorescent lights I use the shutter speed.  The camera is on a tripod as I’m working with rather slow speeds (from 1/10 to 1/50 sec).  If the side lights need to be brighter I just slow down the shutter.  I continue playing with different combinations of shutter/aperture settings until I get the exposures from both the flash and the fluorescents that I like.  Once I find my sweet spot then I check the DOF and if i need to adjust for shallower or deeper, I change the aperture then match the EV change on the shutter speed.  For instance if I wanted shallower DOF then I open the aperture a bit.  This will then affect the light entering from the fluorescents so I compensate by increasing the shutter speed some.

By adjusting the lights nearer or farther from the subject the quality of the light is changed.  While using bare lights, if the light is nearer, the shadows and highlights are softer and by moving the lights back you get sharper or more defined shadows.  If the light source appears smaller from the subject’s point-of-view, the shadows are sharper.  Using the screens or some kind of shoot-through diffusers, though, seems to reverse this rule.  If the light is close to the screen I am only lighting a small portion of the screen and therefore the light seems smaller and therefore, shadows are sharper.  If I move the lights back from the screen I am lighting more of the screen and the lit screen is now a larger light source which gives softer shadows.   This probably sounds confusing but if you play around with this you’ll see what I mean.

With this set-up you can easily change a few things and get completely different looks.   Here I moved the flash to shoot directly into the back screen towards the back of the subject but I put a green shirt over the flash which gave me the green hue.  Threw in a couple ice-cubes for fun.

I was eating lunch at Quizno’s on Saturday and I saw this bottle of Izze that looked pretty cool.  Same set-up as the first shot except when I moved the yellow posterboard around I accidently got the shadows of the clamps in the scene.  They looked great so I rearranged them to look more interesting, almost like window mullions or rays of the sun.

Here’s another, again same basic set-up as the green shot above only this time I used a pink shirt over the flash to match the color of this Jones Soda.

There are lots of little things i did in photoshop of course to enhance the shots, like spot removal, cropping and color tweaking, but this post is long enough.