Liquids

Posted by CraHan (Koolkerke, Belgium) on 21 January 2008 in Miscellaneous and Portfolio.

A while back at photography class we learned about photographing glass. Unfortunately during those evening sessions we don't get much time to experiment and setup our shots. We have to share the studios with 4 or 5 other students. Since I was home for the christmas holidays I wanted to mess around a bit and try some experiments with the little equipment I have lying around (a single SB600 flash for starters).

The setup consists of 2 wine glasses, one filled with white wine, the other with Pisang Ambon and some fake ice cubes (real icecubes would float in this setup). I used a white piece of flexible cardboard for the background and 2 big black areas (the back of a chair in this case) to the right and left of the setup to enhance the contrast. A single SB600 flash positioned to the right and behind the glasses was pointed towards the background and tilted slightly upward to create the gradient effect and light the scene.

A little tip if you own a Nikon camera and you want to try this yourself: to fire the external flash remotely you need to use the builtin popup flash and set your camera to commander mode. Doing so would give you reflections on the front of the glasses, so just hold your hand in front of the popup flash to prevent that. The remote flash will still pickup the spill light and fire though. Easier of course would be to just use a flash sync cable, but the SB600 doesn't have a sync connector.

The whole setup can be seen here. Yes, I do use just about anything I can get my hands on to setup a shoot. I still need to watch that Ratatouille DVD too. *Sigh*, too much fun stuff to do and way too little time to do it all in :).

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