It’s been a busy old time, been working straight for about 10 days, got another 3 days of work to go and then I can a day off, but I want to get my blog a week up, so I decided to start writing now as I have to be up at 4.30am tomorrow to go teach a photography lesson.
So, last week was pretty busy, on Monday I had a product shoot for Whisky Mag Japan. My task was to shoot 74 bottles of whisky and beer, an assortment of whisky cartons, some glasses with and without whisky, six bottles together for an upcoming event and also take some arty shots of those individual bottles. No small task, so preparation played a big part in the shoot.
First off, I visited the office where I was having to set up shop in Tokyo a week before to see if it was possible to shoot in the space (which it was) and have a think about what I would need to bring. Due to the different photos needed, I wanted to have a bit of variety in the images, so I decided to use a basic product table with a variety of gradiation paper, dark black through grey to white, grey-white and then just reverse those to get white. To light the shots when practicing in our spare room I found two speedlites at each side of the bottle on the table with a product lamp to add fill, some black/white boards to add positive or negative light to the scene did the job nicely on my half drunk bottles of whisky I have at home (whisky never stays full in our house for long). I experimented with and without speedlites, when I used boards I supported them with the speedlites and in some cases I even had boards balanced over the top as well to see what kind of effect I could get, taking notes each time so I could recreate the effect later on. All the time I was shooting with my 5D mkII and a new 100mm f2.8L macro, which is rapidly turning into one of my favourite lenses, for portraits as well as marco work it really is top notch. Also, I should point out that the mess in the spare room was all caused by me and my practice shooting, Sue would be horrified if I didn’t point that one out (we are generally pretty clean):
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And this is what things looked like for the bottles with different backgrounds, all white, grey through white, black through white:
After a day of experimenting, I knew what I was doing, sent some samples to the client to see what they liked, knew what was required so all that remained was to go and do the job. The shoot was scheduled for a Monday morning first thing the other side of Tokyo, had to get a rush hour train with a pile of gear which made me slightly unpopular, but carrying a table, tripod, lights, paper and camera bag on a crowded train isn’t so bad when you get the timing right and can put everything against a wall or door at the end of carriage.
So, after arriving safely and getting set up, it was time to take in everything to be covered and it was quite a lot:
However, nothing is impossible if things are prepared right and that’s something I always try to be 100% on top of. Within 30 minutes of arriving I had set up all the gear, figured out the best lighting for backgrounds for the bottles, used the two speedlites to illuminate the paper in the background and provide some light shining through the bottles and using the fill light with some tracing paper over the lamp to reduce glare on the bottle and illuminate the front label. The gradiation paper on the table and some high tech gear such as clothes pegs to hold the sheets on and the all important 10 yen coin to mark the spot on the paper where the bottles worked best.
After everything was set up, it was just a case of conveyor belt photography in some ways, I set the ISO to 400, used the camera on AV setting f7.1 to make sure I got plenty of detail in, overexposed by 1 1/3 stops which I found had worked best in my test shots, dimmed the lighting in the office and we were set to go. I whizzed through all the bottles in a few hours straight shooting, keeping the background and lighting as constant as possible as you can see in the individual shots and the images together in a tear sheet:
After the bottles, it was onto the cartons. I was asked to shoot the rectangular cartons at an angle, with the front being brighter than the side, so I put a white board to camera left to brighten the front of the carton, shine the fill lamp only onto it and a black board camera right to make that side darker. This time the camera at F 5.6, no over exposure:
For more circular cartons, to get the light constant round the front I found the best way to do it was only to use the slightly dimmed office lighting, white boards at either side, no fill or speedlites, just overexpose 1 stop to get a nice bright image, any direct (or indirect via the boards) just made too much glare:
After that, onto glasses shots. I didn’t take small photos with my compact digital, but basically I had the speedlites firing and some very indirect fill light and some black cartons to the side and over the glasses to get a nice dark outline:
Then it was onto six bottles together. Together, they weighed down the product table a bit too much and there was sag in the middle, so I took the paper off the table, set it up on the floor taped to two chairs, laid the bottles out, lit them from behind and above with the lamp, had some white boards at the side to throw some light back over the front labels and we had the shot set up. I couldn’t use my tripod as it was down so low, so I balanced the camera on some spare whisky cartons and we were good to go. This time for the wide shot I used my 24-70 f2.8L lens:
Finally, we moved onto some arty shots, I was requested to get different cuts of aspects of the bottles and the labels, so I moved back up to the product table, had the paper white only, put the bottles on their sides and held them in place with different objects that were lying around, with some dark cards at the side to give a darker edge (which was sorted of negated by overexposing a bit). I used my 7D to magnify the macro lens a bit more and set up the the fill light and the speedlites, had the camera handheld most of the time, but sometimes on the tripod and kept the aperture value on F2.8 to get right in close and get the details whilst creating lots of blur, I was very happy with these shots and hopefully some of them will be used in banners (along with the individual bottle shots) at the upcoming Whisky Live 2011 event that will be happening next month in Tokyo Midtown, looking forward to that:
It was a long day, I arrived at 9.30am, packed up and left about 8.30pm and I had to get through the edit the next day as I had early morning shoots Wednesday and Thursday (which are all edited and sent off) and these last two days I have been teaching photography lessons and will be doing the final one tomorrow morning, so time to get some rest for that…and maybe have a little whisky to mellow me out first.
