Looking back at my archives, it's been awhile since I last did something and wrote something that involved photography. These past few weekends, I have been a little busy with it again and it started with the photo below. Click on "Read more >>" below for more details about the shot.
Rakia |
It is a bottle of Rakia made from plum that came from the head of our team at work. He gave this to me when I came and visited our office in Sofia, Bulgaria. Though it has remained unopened and it will I think until the holidays.
The photo above proved to be challenging and it took two sessions of tinkering to get the shot. The first session was a total disaster in my opinion and wasn't able to get any usable image. The problem that I faced during that time was how to light the bottle from behind. Initially, I wanted to have a black background. So, I pointed a flash directly at the back of the bottle and got uneven lighting as can be seen below. I know it's possible but I will still have to find out how to do it.
Lighting Diagram (Attempt 1) | Rakia (Attempt 1) |
I didn't really liked the way it turned out. It led me to check out Alex Koloskov's tutorials again and this tutorial helped a lot. I did it slightly different as the bottle I am trying to shoot is very different from what was in the tutorial.
So the black background is out of the picture as of the moment and a gradient background based on the tutorial is in. The flash is now pointed towards the background with a slight tilt upwards to achieve that gradient background. I switch positions of the main light and the reflector as can be seen also below that made the bottle face have a cleaner look.
Lighting Diagram (Attempt 2) | Rakia (Attempt 2) |
As shown in the photo above, the background is actually greyish/grayish. Initially, I considered it good enough but during post, I decided to change it to blue.
For a side-by-side look of the original background and the new background. I couldn't say if I gelled it with blue, it would have casted or not that hue back into the liquor. I will have to check that next time.
Original Background | Blue Background |
So, why the title? Stress at work is high and doing this has project has added to that stress but as a colleague of mine put it -- it's good stress. So the bad stress has been replaced by good stress and in a way, it relieved me of the stress after seeing the final output.
Cheers! or Nazdrave! (in Bulgarian).
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