The Real Thing Setup

The Real Thing Setup

Image by nickwheeleroz
Strobist Information:

What started out as a simple exercise in bright field lighting ended up as the monstrosity you see in the setup shot above. I had purchased the bottles of coke to redo my Make Mine a Frosty One (no ice so I couldn’t do that tonight) shot and thought it would be interesting to try and get a shot of all the bottles at once. This also let me try out some sheets of glass I had lucked upon on a recent trip to Ikea. I was having a rummage round in the clearance corner when I came across a cardboard box with the three sheets of toughened white frosted glass in it. The price tag said so I popped it on the trolley and took it to the check out. The lady with the price gun somehow came to the conclusion that the glass should be per sheet but after a short exchange of "I don’t think so’s" she agreed with my assessment that the price was on the box and not on the glass so I got all three for . Result! 🙂

Anyway for this shot, I placed a sheet of glass on top of four chairs and arranged the coke bottles on this. I placed a second sheet of glass vertically behind the flat sheet and held it in place with a reflector holder. I also added a black sheet of card to each side of this to act as a flag from the background light (the bright field setup).

Under the glass I have two Elinchrom D-Lite 4’s. One is pointing straight up towards the base of the coke bottles and one is pointing towards the background.

To light the coke bottles I have one SB-28 acting as a rim light and two SB-28’s on either side at the front. I initially had these firing through translucent umbrellas but the reflection of the umbrellas was showing in the background glass and the specular highlights in the bottles did not look very good. I replaced the umbrellas with two large sheets of white fabric supported by poles held in place with super clamps. These gave a much better highlight and also reflected some of the background light back onto the edges of the bottles.

Finally, I stuck a cardboard box under the glass and used one of the flaps to flag off some of the front light from the flash pointing up as it was creating a horrible flat highlight on the front of the bottles.

In the end a simple exercise morphed into a lighting monster but it made for an interesting diversion and I’m not totally unhappy with the final result. It would have been nice to get a bit more colour in the coke in the front bottles and the bottle at the back right has a number printed on the cap that I didn’t notice until I had uploaded it.

Picture here: The Real Thing

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